Introduction to Schedules

Schedules in GENESIS are collections of named events that are linked to an instance of a resource. For example, you can assign a schedule to a light or a group of lights. A schedule can be a single event or a set of events.

Events are schedule items and can occur periodically. Since schedules are collections of events, they can also be recurrent.

GENESIS offers a full-featured schedule management with runtime visualization and operator interaction support. To learn more, view Schedules Core Components and Architecture.

Schedules are linked to a set of tags via ValueSets. When a scheduled event begins, it reads the current value of the tag and, if necessary, writes a new value to it. Depending on the asset being controlled, ValueSets can be a variety of data types, such as booleans or integers.

Since a schedule can define a set of events, you have fine control over the scheduled resource. For example, you can have the lights turn on at the beginning of a schedule in the morning, dim during midday, turn up at dusk, and return to low light conditions when the evening turns to night.

You can define holidays that are observed in your country or by your organization. Schedules that are assigned to those holidays override regular weekly schedules that would normally apply on that day. You can also create exception schedules, which have higher importance than any other schedule.

When two or more schedules have events of the same type that overlap, a conflict occurs. The schedule configurator in Workbench allows you to set priorities for each event in a schedule and uses these priorities to determine which schedule's event applies in case of conflict. A monitor view allows you to see which events are currently in force.

The monitor view also allows you to manually override a scheduled event or clear previous overrides. The override can be temporary and expire after the specified period.

The following table summarizes the key Schedules features:

Feature

Description

Flexible Schedule Definition

You can create and configure a variety of events, such as periodic, exception, and holiday-based events.

Scheduled Event Priorities

You can assign priorities to scheduled events to control the schedule output when conflicting or overlapping events of the same type occur.

Operator Interaction

You can control, override, or set schedule output values in runtime using Workbench or Schedule Control in GraphWorX™.

Preview Support

You can preview the current and future schedule outputs in Workbench and in Schedule Control in GraphWorX.

Availability Feature

You can define schedule events to highlight availability of resource or an asset.

Schedule items modify the value of the tag that controls the resource. Thus, a schedule item can not only turn lights on and off, which would be represented by a Boolean (1 or 0) value, but it can dim the lights to a specified setting and much more. The condition of a resource is represented by a tag stored in a data source. So, when you change a value associated with a tag, you control the resource.

You can perform the following tasks for schedule items:

  • Assign a resource or a group of resources to a schedule item.

  • Set the boundary condition (start and stop) for a schedule item.

  • Set the value of the tag associated with the resource at the time when a schedule item starts or stops.

  • Set the frequency at which a schedule item occurs.

  • Save, import, and export schedules.

What's Next?

Creating a Schedule Overview