A Tour of EDGEBIC Options and Settings

The EDGEBIC settings divide into engine settings that change how the schedule is computed and display settings that change how it looks, plus the administrative surfaces for the datasource, users and roles, and data management. In EDGEBIC by User Solutions the configuration is not one long preferences list. It is a small number of purposeful screens, and knowing which screen owns what keeps administration calm: display changes are always safe, plan changes are always deliberate.

This post is a map, not a deep dive on any one setting. For the full reference behind every screen here, read the EDGEBIC admin guide. It names controls at the tab and screen level, never any internal path.

The Two Kinds of Setting

The most useful mental model for EDGEBIC settings is the split between display and engine.

Display settings change how the schedule is presented. The scheduler and Gantt configuration, the actual-versus-planned overlay, and the variance thresholds that color a job on time or late all live here. Changing them changes the picture and never the plan. A planner can tune the view all afternoon and no job moves.

Engine settings change how the schedule is computed. The scheduling policy and the optimizer engine choice live here. Changing one of these can change the plan on the next run, so they sit apart from the display settings on purpose.

Hold this split and the rest of the tour falls into place. When someone asks "is it safe to change this?" the answer is usually just "is it display or engine?"

The Administrative Surfaces

Beyond the scheduling settings, a handful of screens are the administrator's core.

• The DataSource tab is where you choose between the local single-file database and a shared SQL Server database, enter and test connection details, and export a backup. It is the home of the datasource switch, covered in switching the EDGEBIC datasource.
• Users and roles is where accounts are created, deactivated, and assigned permissions. Who can reschedule, who can only log actuals, and who can reach data management are all decided here, as role-based access explains.
• Data management holds the utilities, including the guarded Clear Data Tables tool and the layout resets. It is the screen you visit rarely and deliberately.

These three cover the datasource, the people, and the destructive operations: the administrator's real responsibilities. Everything else is either display tuning or the scheduling policy.

The Scheduling Policy and the Optimizer

The scheduling policy is the engine setting that most affects results. It is where the optimizer engine is chosen, between the multi-run engine and the mathematical optimization engine.

• The multi-run engine evaluates many complete schedules with different orderings and returns the best one, guaranteed never worse than the baseline. It is a search, not a promise of perfection, and its guarantee is exactly the never-worse clamp.
• The mathematical optimization engine solves the scheduling model directly and reports a proven optimality gap, so you know how close the result is to the theoretical best.

Two design choices make this safe to administer. The optimizer ships behind a setting that starts off, so a plant adopts it deliberately. And selecting an engine never breaks scheduling: if the chosen engine is unavailable on a given host, the system falls back to the standard engine rather than failing. You can enable optimization, and you can change your mind, without ever putting scheduling itself at risk. The deeper mechanics live in the optimization material for planners who want them.

Display Configuration Worth Knowing

On the display side, two settings come up often enough to name. The actual-versus-planned overlay shows logged actuals against the original plan on the same view, which is how a supervisor sees drift at a glance. The variance thresholds decide when a job colors as on time, at risk, or late, so a plant can tune the coloring to its own tolerance for slip. Both are display settings: they change what you see, never what the schedule does.

This is the reassuring part of the settings tour. The screens a planner touches most are the ones that cannot cause harm, so day-to-day tuning is low-stakes by design.

A Quick Reference

The whole administrative and configuration surface fits on one page, which is a fair summary of the design: purposeful screens, a clean split between safe display tuning and considered engine changes, and destructive operations gathered in one guarded place.

For where to begin, see how to install and connect EDGEBIC, and for the general context these settings serve, read what production scheduling is. The full administrator reference is the EDGEBIC admin guide.