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Auto-balancing in Pega Robot Manager

Pega Robot Manager™ uses Auto-balancing to dynamically move robots between work groups to maximize robot efficiency and ensure the system processes robotic work assignments within their Service-Level Agreement (SLA).

By continuously monitoring work groups and Work Queues, Robot Manager determines which work groups require more robots to complete all their assignments on time and which work groups have more robots than required based on the SLA of open assignments and the work group priority. As a result, Robot Manager automatically moves robots across work groups to ensure that the number of robots in each work group is enough to complete all open assignments efficiently.

Automatic workload balancing provides the following advantages in terms of efficiency and costs:

  • Automatic re-purposing keeps all available robots busy and working with minimal idle time.
  • As a robot administrator, you can focus on other tasks because you do not need to manually monitor the status of robots, workgroups, and assignments. Additionally, you do not need to manually move robots between work groups or create applicable schedules.
  • As the system constantly redirects robots to complete open assignments across multiple work groups, you need fewer robots to complete the incoming work.

Robotic assignment SLAs

An SLA specifies a deadline by which a robot must complete all instances of a given assignment type. By defining an SLA, you can measure the performance and service of your robots based on your business objectives. Additionally, an SLA can help you decide whether to move more robots to a work group where you observe an increased number of SLA breaches. The default SLA value is three hours.

To help you meet your business objectives, set measurable performance standards for completing robotic assignments. Meaningful SLAs influence how Pega Robot Manager determines whether a work group is reaching its capacity limits and, therefore, needs more robots to work on assignments that are approaching an SLA deadline.

For more information about configuring SLAs for robotic assignments, see Managing Service-Level Agreements of robotic assignments.

Work group priorities

To ensure that the system allocates robots to complete the most critical essential assignments as the highest priority, Auto-balancing uses work group priorities to determine how to assign robots when the system does not have enough available robots to complete the work on time. You apply automatic workload balancing to a work group, and then specify its priority.

As a robot administrator, you can assign one of the following SLA priority values to each work group. To specify to the Auto-balancing engine that a work group performs work with a lower or higher priority, use the slider to apply one of the following priority values:

  • -2 – Not a priority
  • -1 – Low priority
  • 0 – Neutral priority
  • 1 – High priority
  • 2 – Essential priority

When a higher priority work group (1 or 2) lacks enough assigned robots to complete assignments on time and no stand-by robots are available, the Auto-balancing engine reassigns robots from a lower priority work group (-2, -1, or 0) to the higher priority work group to complete the critical work first. The Auto-balancing engine reassigns a working robot after the robot completes its current assignment. In the Auto-balancing section of the Settings landing page, you can turn work groups on or off for Auto-balancing and set the SLA priority value as shown in the following figure:

The Auto-balancing section of the Settings page, showing the location of checkboxes to enable or disable Auto-balancing for a work group as well as the slider to set SLA priority level.

For more information about enabling Auto-balancing and setting work group priorities for Auto-balancing, see Designating work groups for auto-balancing of robot workload.

Estimation of the workload for work groups

By analyzing the number of assignments that reach their deadlines during a specific period in the future, Robot Manager can predict the expected workload in a work group.

Robot Manager uses a time window of three auto-balancing evaluation intervals to make predictions. The default value of an auto-balancing evaluation interval is 60 minutes. For example, when Robot Manager decides whether to move robots between work groups at 8 AM, it looks at how many assignments will reach the SLA deadline between 8 AM and 9 AM, 8 AM and 10 AM, and 8 AM and 11 AM across all work groups.

By looking ahead at three subsequent evaluation intervals, the Auto-balancing engine determines how the workload in a work group is trending and calculates the number of robots that are needed to complete work on time.

For more information about estimating workloads, see Estimating the workload across work groups.
 

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