Criterion definitions

Criterion definitions determine how individual agents are ranked or ordered. This ranking allows supervisors to take into account various criteria to allow higher ranked agents to select better schedules in schedule bidding, or have their preferences used more often. The criteria includes up to ten fields.  Each field can be any of the three types: numeric, date, or random.  

These fields may contain criterion values such as agent skill strength (e.g., hire date or promotion date) which affect the ranking of agents within the agent group. These fields are then used to determine an agent’s rank for each given criteria, using either ascending or descending ordering (as specified). The individual criterion ranking should then be weighted (e.g., hire date = 30%; random rank = 20%), and an overall rank is calculated. The total percentage for all the criteria should be 100%. This overall ranking determines the precedence of the agents’ preferences in case of a tie between two agents with the same preferences for a given interval. It also determines the order in which schedule bids are processed so the agent with the highest overall rank receives his or her first schedule choice.

It is not advantageous to have more than one random value since you could easily add all the percentages of the individual random values and put them into one field.  For example, RandomValue1 = 10%, RandomValue2= 15%, and RandomValue3 = 15% is same as having one random value = 40%.

Randomization can be used also as a tie breaker if all other criteria is the same (e.g. same skill level or same hire date). The weight of Random Rank in relation to the other criteria, determines how important randomization is. If the random field is not used, it is not considered in relation to preferences. You may also use Random Rank as the only criteria for ranking.