I was asked to provide my recommendation on potentially requesting additional licenses for our Unattended Robots. My research resulted in the following summary below. (Feel free to use any or all this information to communicate with your colleagues/customers) Adjust as necessary.
The Challenges and Considerations of Running Multiple Robots on a Single License, Particularly for Diverse Users and Schedules
1. Resource Conflict: In scenarios where multiple users’ schedules require simultaneous robot operation, their robot will compete for the sole available license. This will lead to bottlenecks, delays, and resource conflict, resulting in extended wait times for automation task execution.
2. Queue Management: With only one license at our disposal, robots are systematically queued to execute tasks in succession. Robots must wait their turn to run, which can lead to unpredictable wait times and may not align with the user/customer needs.
3. Scheduling Challenges: Accommodating everyone’s preferences and schedules with just one license will likely be challenging. Scheduling conflicts will inevitably arise if multiple users/customers require their robots to operate concurrently.
4. Impact on Efficiency and Productivity: The limited concurrency of a single license setup will significantly affect the efficiency and productivity of automation processes. Users/customers will experience delays in task execution, potentially resulting in operational inefficiencies.
5. Coordination Complexity: Coordinating and managing the concurrent execution of multiple robots, such as 15 robots for example, with only one license presents considerable challenges. This would require meticulous scheduling and communication among users to prevent conflicts.
Options :
- Queue-Based Execution: We can opt to continue with our current single license configuration. In this scenario, users/customers would need to be informed that their robot’s tasks will be queued, and that their robot process will execute after any other robot processes in the queue have completed.
- Additional Licenses: To provide users with more independence and flexibility, we can request additional licenses that match the number of users desiring unhindered robot operation. This approach ensures that users are not constrained by queuing limitations.
- Scheduling and Prioritization System: An alternative approach involves implementing a scheduling and prioritization system. This system can help manage robot execution when licenses are limited. High-priority tasks receive precedence during allocation, ensuring critical processes are prioritized.
Based on my findings we’d need to know how many of our users/customers need unhindered processing of their robot execution in order to recommend multiple licenses but if the users/customers don’t require unhindered processing a single license is sufficient theoretically.
Important conditions to consider: To avoid any issues as the number of robots needed continue to grow and with the accumulation of temporary files, logs, and data generated during each task (which will consume disk space over time as a result of running multiple automation tasks sequentially) it would be beneficial to have at least 1 additional license and split the robots between the 2 licenses. Additionally, as the number of robots increase the likelihood of more disk space being needed on the VM is very likely.