Would this be it? I logged enhancement request 6878526 with the idea of Scheduler taking into account the rank of the territory when scheduling. The RCD of 12.1.1 has this in it: “Sort Winning Territory Resources by Absolute Rank”. Meaning my previous post would be solved? I notice it says Casema wanted this feature… 
So yeah, I’m thinking this might be it! I still wonder whether costs are assigned to rank… without higher costs for lower ranks Scheduler might still choose a resource from a lower ranked territory because the travel time is lower. Questions, questions.
Other than that, Oracle also has done some significant optimization on the Scheduler part. When scheduling tasks to resources, Scheduler will firstly sort the tasks to their geographic proximity. This means travel times will be more optimized. I wonder how much better this works when you don’t use plan windows, but we’ll have to test that. I mean, sorting on geographic proximity is quite worthless if you want to optimize the promised time (as opposed to a window), but in that case you find the promised time more important than the reduction in travel time. Which might be very valid for your business case. Nevertheless, this feature could be very useful.
The other major feature in Scheduler is the long awaited cross-engineer-optimizing. Scheduler used to optimize single trips only, but R12.1.1 now optimizes across trips / across engineers. Basically this is what you want. If you have 100 engineers to schedule every day, you can’t verify manually if Oracle really optimized all schedules. Optimizing all individual trips would still not tackle the case in which some of the tasks at engineer 1 would be lower in cost when assigned to engineer 2. This new feature promises to solve this issue. You might want to schedule this Optimization Program (it comes as a concurrent program) a few times a day, so you don’t have engineers doing nothing at the end of the day (because optimization might reschedule the tasks to less engineers).
