if you hold a job...

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Keith Smith
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if you hold a job...

Post by Keith Smith »

In case there are some who aren't familiar with how FSE works, each airport has a number of gates. Each of those gates can generate up to 3 passengers. If a job is 'taken', ie, a pilot adds it to their queue, the gate does NOT generate any more jobs until those existing jobs are flown or have expired.

So, if you build a queue of jobs and then sit on them for any length of time, please know that the system isn't generating any replacement jobs from those gates, they're still considered 'full'.

Edit: I'm only talking about 'Green' jobs (those which are generated by the gates associated with an FBO passenger terminal)
wmburns
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Re: if you hold a job...

Post by wmburns »

I personally did not realize there was ANY impact to the system if a job is held for a long period of time as long as the job was eventually flown.

I fully understand the impact to the system of "hording" jobs that are allowed to expire in the queue.

I always intend to fly every job that I hold and always make a point to release any job should my plans change. Therefore I'm not allowing jobs to expire in my queue.

I have had cases occur where I planned a flight earlier in the day confirming the availability of FSE jobs. When I got home ready to fly the jobs, the jobs were gone. It was after a few of those events where I started making a point to place the jobs in my queue once the flight plan was built.

Keith, do you have access to any reports that let you know how wide spread the problem is?

So you are also saying that every airport pair with more than 3 PAX requires more than one gate? I honestly thought that the gates generate PAX at a certain rate and therefore when there were larger "bunches" of PAX going to a destination, that meant that no one was flying them. Which of course the larger aircraft need the larger groups of PAX to make operations possible.

Interesting problem.
snglecoil
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Re: if you hold a job...

Post by snglecoil »

Thanks for the info, Keith. I suspected that was the case, but didn't know for certain. I've been reluctant to reserve jobs that I couldn't fly immediately purely on the basis of what I thought was good FSE etiquette. It has bitten me twice where I was checking the destination airport for return jobs and had the original jobs snatched up in the 2 minutes it took before I committed to them. All good though.
Chris
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wmburns
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Re: if you hold a job...

Post by wmburns »

Just wondering. I'm assuming the jobs in question were black re-supply jobs.

Is there a difference in how the green PAX jobs and black jobs are handled with regards to being on hold? For example does the system only allow a single black re-supply job per destination? If so, could this explain why being on hold in a pilot's queue would have a larger effect than what other wise might be expected?

Just trying to understand so that I can better manage. Thanks.
Nelson L.
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Re: if you hold a job...

Post by Nelson L. »

I'm pretty sure the black jobs also have an expiration date and as far as I know act the same way as the green jobs. The "simple" answer is to just not hold jobs, although that sometimes isn't feasible.
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ridikamus
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Re: if you hold a job...

Post by ridikamus »

Player generated cargo runs do not expire. If someone grabs a cargo run and sits on it, the supplies/building materials/fuel contained in the run are taken out of circulation. Fortunately, as Keith noted, the owner can reclaim the job assignment if necessary.
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wmburns
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Re: if you hold a job...

Post by wmburns »

At the risk of beating a dead horse..........

A re-supply job represents a physical asset of a certain quantity. When the job is placed in someone's queue, the system can't generate additional jobs and keep everything in balance. This make sense. This also makes sense why they don't expire.

In the case of a green PAX job generated by a gate at a certain rate (with a random factor thrown in). I fully understand that any specific Green job placed in a queue isn't available for anyone else to fly. What I'm having trouble understanding is that placing that job in queue stops the gate from generating future jobs.

I'm basing this on personal experience. On several occasions I have planned a flight in the morning. As my practice, the available jobs were placed into my queue to ensure the jobs would be available at the actual flight time. In this example the flight is not full. Some time later when ready to start the flight, a pleasant surprise to find additional jobs are available. Which is good for me because these new jobs can be scooped up and flown with the others.

IF holding jobs actually stops the system from generating new jobs THEN the expected result would be no new jobs between the same airport pairs. This does not agree with my experience.

Again, I'm not disagreeing that wholesale job "hording" is bad for the over all FSE system as it makes jobs unavailable for anyone else to fly. This goes double if the horded jobs are allowed to expire in the queue.

<covers head>I'm just not convinced that holding jobs that are eventually flown is soooo bad for the system as a whole.

Respectfully.
Last edited by wmburns on Wed Jun 10, 2015 10:09 am, edited 2 times in total.
Peter Grey
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Re: if you hold a job...

Post by Peter Grey »

Lots of confusion here on how jobs work. Here is my understanding of them based on various forum posts in the FSE forum.

There are 3 types of jobs.

1. Green jobs - Each "Gate" generates 3 passengers (by creating green jobs). Once these passengers are generated no more jobs are generated until the passenger count for that gate is below 3. This happens in 1 of 2 ways. The job is flown and completed (removing it and the pax from the system) or the job expires (removing it and the pax from the system). Simply accepting a job will not create another one to replace it.

Example, you have a 1 gate FBO and it generates 1 3 pax job. A user picks up that job, NO job will be creating until the job times out or the flight is completed.

Therefore someone taking all the jobs and "holding" them prevents new jobs from being created. This was the reason for the first post in this thread.

FBO owners can see the number of pax that have been generated per airport. We can then "find" each job at the airport, any missing pax indicate that a user has that job in their list. Using this we can determine that "hoarding" is occurring. Note we have no way to determine who is hoarding them.

2. Black jobs - The system generates black jobs using a wide variety of templates. A template sort of acts as a gate by defining the departure airport (using a set of criteria), arrival airport (using a separate set of criteria), number of pax/cargo (from a range), pay, and name.

Each "area" (which I can't define past that) is given a certain number of black jobs from each template (this is why areas with a denser set of airports have fewer black jobs per airport). Black jobs expire in the same way as green jobs. Therefore hoarding of black jobs is also possible. However in a practical sense there are so many black job templates 1 user hording black jobs is unlikely to be noticed (as there is no way to know the "proper" number of black jobs). FSE admin can determine if this is occurring, it's unknown what action (if any) they take in this case.

3. Supply Jobs - Users can create jobs to move supplies from airport to airport. These can be supplies (most common), building materials, or fuel. All aspects of supply jobs are created by the user and supply jobs have no expiration date. Unlike other jobs supply jobs can be "revoked" from a user at any time. In this sense supply jobs cannot be hoarded.

Hopefully that clarifies some of this.
Peter Grey
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Keith Smith
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Re: if you hold a job...

Post by Keith Smith »

wmburns, the only way a gate will create more jobs at a given airport after you've added the existing jobs to your queue is if the gate wasn't yet full (ie, it hadn't generated 3 pax yet).

For example, 52AZ has 4 gates, they're all pointed at 46CA. When the gates are full, there will be 12 pax going to/from 52AZ to 46CA. Someone comes along and adds them all to their queue with the intention of flying those jobs 3 days from now. I can 100% promise you that the system will not generate any more green jobs to/from the 52AZ/46CA city pair, as it already has 12 pax in the system (they're in somebody's queue).

Now, let's say the person DOES fly all those jobs, or the jobs expire (doesn't matter which). NOW the gate has the opportunity to create more jobs. It will do this, relatively slowly (it gets a few shots per day to do this, and it's random as to whether a gate generates none, some or a full compliment of jobs during one of the job creation events). So, let's assume it spits out 6 pax. You come along and add them all to your queue. An hour later, 3 more jobs show up between the two airports (for a total of 9). A few hours later, 3 more jobs show up (for a total of 12). 6 of the jobs are available to the public, plus the 6 that are in the queue.

That is the only condition under which you'll see more jobs showing up an airport even when you have jobs in your queue...it's because the gates still have been spooling back up to their full load at the time you added the available jobs to your queue.

As an example, right now, 52AZ has 12 pax going to/from 46CA. Those jobs are all available on the airport pages as we speak (6 going from 46CA to 52AZ, 6 going the other way). 40G also has 12 pax that have been generated (ie, the gates are full). However, only 6 jobs are showing up on the airport pages right now (3 from 46CA to 40G, 3 going the other way). This means that the other jobs are in somebody's queue. The system is not going to generate any more jobs between 40G and 46CA until some of the jobs are flown or are expired.

The hard and fast rule is that a gate will only generate 3 pax at any given time.
Keith Smith
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Re: if you hold a job...

Post by Keith Smith »

Last thought, "hoarding" is a relative term. I have no idea what's considered practical versus excessive in terms of how long you keep jobs in a queue. It could be hours, or days depending on your perspective. My only reason for making the post is that I suspected people were not aware of what impact it has. ie, they were keeping the jobs in their queue, not knowing what impact it would have on the ability of the airport to generate replacement jobs for others to fly.

What people DO with the information is beyond my control. The intention wasn't to say, "you must fly the jobs within xx hours." It was simply to raise awareness for a topic which probably wasn't well understood.
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