Working with work patterns

Work patterns are sequences of working hours or shifts. They define regular periods of working and non-working time, such as the normal working week and weekends. You assign work patterns to calendars - or they can be created automatically as part of the calendar creation process. A calendar can use more than one work pattern, and each work pattern can be used in more than one calendar. For example, a large outdoor engineering project may require one work pattern for the winter months when poor daylight and bad weather may lead to shorter working days, and another work pattern for the summer months when longer days and good weather mean that working days can be longer.

Each work pattern is represented by a folder in Library Explorer. Within each folder, you create the shifts for that work pattern, then you specify the working periods for each shift.

For example, the Standard Week work pattern has seven shifts (one for each day of the week), and each shift has its own working and non-working periods. The weekend shifts are completely non-working and the weekday shifts have the following working and non-working periods:

Non-working - 00:00 - 09:00.
Working - 09:00 - 12:45.
Non-working - 12:45 - 13:45.
Working - 13:45 - 17:30.
Non-working - 17:30 - 00:00.

When the end of a work pattern is reached, the sequence goes back to the beginning and starts again, so a work pattern defines a potentially infinite set of working days. If all your projects work to the same default calendar, you could edit the Standard Week work pattern and tailor it to your working week. If your projects are more complex and involve a number of different shifts, you will need to set up additional work patterns.

Days and weeks can have different durations in different work patterns. For example, an 8 hour day contains 28,800 seconds and a 7.5 hour day contains 27,000; a week made up of 8 hour days contains 144,000 seconds and a week made up of 7.5 hour days contains 135,000. Time units in Asta Powerproject have a default duration, but you can specify the exact duration of the time units as they are used in each work pattern. For example, you could specify a day as being 7.5 hours in one work pattern and 8 in another. This enables Asta Powerproject to convert durations between different time units with complete accuracy. The precise length of a time unit in relation to a work pattern is known as an override. If you do not specify time unit overrides for a work pattern, the default time unit durations are used.