A guide to RSO Configuration & Debugging – Optimization Requests

If you are working in an enterprise Dynamics 365 Field Service implementation with RSO (Resource Scheduling Optimization) add-in, you must have felt that there is limited information about RSO and there aren’t many blog posts available either. One reason is that RSO doesn’t offer any trial.

To address this, I am starting a blog series on setting up RSO based on the business requirements and debugging it.

To start with, when you are setting up RSO as per your business requirement or debugging existing optimization results, the first step you will be doing is analysing the Optimization Request run to figure out what went wrong or what didn’t work as expected and you will adjust the Scope/Goal or most of the time, it will be data captured against Resource Requirement and/or Booking.

Operation and Operation Reason in the optimization requests against the Resource Requirement or Booking Microsoft shows if it went well or not. Some of the Operation and Operation Reason are straightforward

E.g.

• Create: a new booking has been created for the resource requirement.
• Update: an existing booking has been updated with a new bookable resource or the estimated arrival time has been updated due to the changes in the existing booking of the resource etc.
• Invalid – Estimated Duration less than or equal to 0: Resource requirement duration is 0

However, not all the Operation Reasons have details that are sufficient to understand what is missing in the Resource Requirement or Booking to do the fix. Below are the rest of the Operation and Reasons that are not straightforward and could cause confusion.

E.g

• Invalid – None
• Invalid – Empty Reason Not Scheduled
• Unchanged – None

Here’s the list of Operation, Operation Reasons and their explanation that I have collected from the Microsoft team on different occasions.

Sno	Operation	Operation Reason	Definition
1	Invalid	Requirement Status is not Active	Resource Requirement is not active i.e. msdyn_status = Cancelled/Completed.
2	Invalid	Booking outside Optimization Scope	Bookings got excluded from optimization scope definition due to the ‘Now or After’ settings in the Booking view under scope. Scopes in Resource Scheduling Optimization for Dynamics 365 Field Service – Dynamics 365 Field Service | Microsoft Learn
3	Invalid	Estimated Duration less than or equal to 0	Resource Requirement’s duration is 0
4	Invalid	Latitude or Longitude invalid	Resource Requirement’s Latitude and/or longitude is empty or invalid (Map provider doesn’t recognize the lat/long)
5	Invalid	Scheduling Window outside of Optimization Range	Resource Requirement’s: Time From Promised and Time To Promised OR Date Window Start +Time Window Start,  Date Window End + Time Window End is outside of the Optimization Request’s optimization range.
6	Invalid	Optimization is not enabled	Resource Requirement’s scheduling Method is not set or set to ‘Do Not Optimize’.
7	Invalid	Booking without requirement	Bookings used it in the scope might have been created directly under without requirements.
8	Invalid	Requirements Belonging To a Resource Group, cannot be scheduled	Resource Groups aren’t supported by RSO
9	Invalid	Lock to Pool type of Resource is not currently supported by RSO	Pools aren’t supported by RSO
10	Invalid	Bookings overlaps with Optimization Start Range	Applies to Single Resource Optimization. Booking’s Start Time is same as the optimization range start date time
11	Invalid	Bookings overlaps with Optimization End Range	Applies to Single Resource Optimization. Booking’s End Time is same as the optimization range end date time
12	Not Scheduled	None	Unable to find a matching resource within the scope and given Goal constraints.
13	Delete	None	Due the limitations in no. of resources available, RSO deletes the existing booking for some jobs and allocate those resources to more suitable jobs.
14	Invalid	None	RSO at times marks the Bookings that are outside of the range with Operation as Invalid and Operation Reason as None due to the behaviour of the product. There is no defined segregation on exactly what time when RSO run or for what conditions (data) in Bookings it shows ‘None’ vs. ‘Booking outside Optimization Scope’, it is purely based on the RSO algorithm execution.
15	Unchanged	None	Scheduling Method for a Resource Requirement is not set to Optimize, RSO will have Operation as Unchanged and Operation Reason as None.
16	Invalid	Empty Reason Not Scheduled	In the Optimization Request Bookings (ORB) page, we might get a visual bug where the “reason” is blank until you click on the booking itself, but after you have clicked on the booking it will show up on the ORB page.
17	Invalid	Requirement is partially fulfilled already, can’t be optimized	Resource Requirement was already booked but the associated Booking was not included in the scope.
18	Invalid	Templates Cannot Be Scheduled	Requirements Groups Templates attempt to schedule. RSO cannot schedule template
19	Invalid	Predecessor or successor out of optimization scope	In case of multi requirements. Predecessor and successor all need to be included in scope.

Hope this helps when you setup or debug RSO results to further adjust your data or RSO settings.