Communication between Bot's

[GavinRudling]

Good day Team, Trust you had a wonderful festive season so far.

I had a single Bot / VM on the BPC platform that manages about 18 processes of which some of them are dependent on each other. I have now been provided with a second Bot/VM, to share the load and am trying to create a sort of management process to control the scheduling under certain conditions and statuses.

Both bots are looking at the same Queue, but I am not sure how to synchronize the communications between the Bots, to determine what the status might be of a dependent process, like completed, deferred or busy etc.

Any ideas / Solution on how to make this happen? Unfortunately, we do not have access to BP Supervisor.

Kind Regards

Gavin

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Gavin Rudling
Digital Consultant & Developer
Cog3nt
Africa/Johannesburg
0813906789
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[GavinRudling]

Hi Andrew, much appreciated.

Quite possible, I have been thinking of this over the festive break. I just got to figure out the how (design), with what I currently have. 

I do think it is possible, just need time to think on a few ideas.

At the moment I'm leaning towards possibly a 2-queue scenario, one being the scheduled tasks to run the processes and the other to manage the conditions.

Kind regards

Gavin

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Gavin Rudling
Digital Consultant & Developer
Cog3nt
Africa/Johannesburg
0813906789
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[GavinRudling]

Hi Zdenek

Thanks for the idea, I will look into this as well.

To be honest I was not aware that you could lock something like an excel document. I thought the document would be automatically locked when opened, then I check to see if the document is read only.

I am not sure if I understand fully yet. Is there a specific VBO on which I can do the locking? The only one I am aware of is the in the Work Queue VBO. Is that the same one?

Kind regards

Gavin

[GavinRudling]

Hi Denis,

I agree with your key concept. The production bots should just respond to the item that is in the queue regardless of which bot picks up the task and this logic should not be in any of the Clients (sub) processes.

I have a management process that contains the supposed logic for that.

This is the first of this type of project that I am getting involved with, so I am still investigating the how too.

To make it more difficult, we don't have a development platform where we can test and analyse, and processes can be requested to be added at almost any time., so for me there is a bit of a challenge.

We seem to be finding the need to do this more often, but at this point each opportunity and / or client seems to have their unique requirements and infrastructures. (On-Prem and Cloud).

Thanks again for your valued comments and suggestions, much appreciated.

Kind regards

Gavin

[GavinRudling]

Hi Nilesh

Sorry I am not strong with putting thoughts into words and thank you for all the effort you have provided to explain a possible solution.

I will go through your suggestions and certainly will use some of the ideas.

I have the 2 bots that are running with approximately 18 processes across 3 different Business units for a Parent company which spans over 3 different countries in Southern Africa.

Some of these processes can run at any time and some are dependent on certain conditions which could be based on results of other process.

We used to run with just one (1) bot, so everything was just in sequence, but now there are too many processes to run in a single day, so we have acquired another bot to handle the workload, so some processes are running in parallel.

I have now created a work queue with a list of all the processes which need to run for the day.

I just need to work out some logic to load the work queue with the process that needs to run next if all the conditions have been met.

Example of conditions:                A dependent process has been delayed or deferred to a later time, or maybe even failed for some reason.

                                                                Process (A) might have been run by Bot (1) and Process (B) might be picked up by Bot (2)

So basically, I am looking for the best way to design the schedule managing process.

Thank you once again.

Kind regards

Gavin

[GavinRudling]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your response, much appreciated.

I am busy working on a design very similar to how you have explained it below.

I just have to cater for about 18+ processes and a number of various conditions.

I may be over complicating the scheduler process, by trying to make the scalability as simple as possible, as I got a good idea what is going to happen in the future with additional processes been added, etc.

Kind regards

Gavin

[shreya.khot]

Hi Gavin,

I was going through the content on Digital Exchange & came across one of the packages which reminded me of this discussion...

Utility Program for Work Queue Item Mover XBP - 1.0.0

check if this object helps you with any of the features- https://digitalexchange.blueprism.com/dx/entry/3439/solution/work-queue-item-mover

Thanks