Hard and Soft Constraints
Hard Constraint are criteria that must be met by all the technicians to be returned in the search results, where as Soft constraint are criteria that need not be met but have a bearing on the overall match score for each technician.
The following parameters are considered as hard constraints:
• Skills marked as “Required”
• Technicians marked as “Mandatory”
• Technicians marked as “Prohibited”
The following parameters are considered as soft constraints:
• Preferred technician
• Skills not marked as "Required"
• Product expertise
• Eligibility rules
These hard and soft constraints are evaluated as below:
• If a technician does not match a hard constraint, he will not be returned in the search results.
• If a technician matches a soft constraint or both soft and hard constraints, then weight values are applied to the matching soft constraint to arrive at the overall match score. For more information, see
Computing Total Score.
• If only hard constraints are met on all results, then the results share the same rank. No weight is applied.