The Site Planner component is part of the Site Planner Module. It helps you order sites from a set of candidates.

Installing the Site Planner Module

This functionality is part of the Site Planner Module. This module can be installed by clicking the Install button on the Site Planner product page. Once installed, you will need to restart Overture to use this module's features.

Accessing The Site Planner Component

The site planner module adds a new button to the Toolbar:

Clicking this button will display the properties of the site planner component in the Properties Window:

You can also access the site planning component from the Optimization > Site Planner menu option.

The Site Planner module comes with a process page that accelerates its use. You can access this page from the Start Page, by first clicking on Optimization, and then clicking on Site Planner:

The functions of this page are described here.

The Site Planning Process

A simplified version of Overture's site planning algorithm is given below:

        Deactivate all candidate sites
        
        Repeat the following until the candidate set is empty
        
            For each remaining candidate site
                Activate the candidate
                Compute the network KPIs and adjust for the current cost
                If this configuration is better than any seen previously, remember it
                Deactivate the candidate
                
            Activate the best candidate found above
            Mark it as planned and remove it from the candidate set
            Reject any remaining candidates that are too close to the planned set
            
        When no candidates remain, return the set of planned sites
    

The candidate set is taken from the currently selected set of Sites.

Note that the algorithm implemented in the Site Planner module incorporates many proprietary speed-ups and enhancements. This enables it to process many thousands of candidate sites in reasonable time scales.

Site Planner Flags and States

The date and time of selection is stored in a Flag on the site entity when the site is selected. The flag used is referenced by the Selection Date Flag Name property of the site planner component. If you need to manually change the selection ordering, you can easily edit the date and time values in this flag manually.

A site is considered to be a Candidate when the Selection Date Flag is not set and the site is in the selected set of sites.

A site is considered to be Planned when the Selection Date Flag has a value and the

Sites can be given a cost to indicate the difficultly of activating them. The cost is used when evaluating the site's performance in the network. The algorithm will favor cheaper sites over more expensive ones with the same performance. The cost is stored in the Flag referenced by the Site Cost Flag Name property.

A site can be Rejected for various reasons during site planning: perhaps is too close to an existing planned site, or perhaps it makes a KPI worse. If a site is rejected, the reason for the rejection is stored in the Flag referenced by the Site Rejection Flag Name property.

Properties

The site planning component has the following properties:

• Selection Cost Flag Name. This is the name of the Flag that stores the cost of activating the site.
• Selection Date Flag Name. This is the name of the Flag that stores the date of selection.
• Site Rejection Flag Name. This is the name of the flag that stores the reason a site was rejected during the site planning process.
• Minimum Separation. This prevents the algorithm from selecting nearby sites. Any candidate site that is closer than this value to any planned site will be rejected.
• Objective. This is the Objective that will be used to choose candidates at each stage of the site planning process.
• Positive Selections Only. If set to True, then only sites that improve the specified objective will be added. If False then sites that degrade network performance will also be considered (note that adding sites may degrade some KPIs, for example those based on interference).

Actions

The site planner component provides the following actions:

• Start. This starts the site planning process on the selected sites. When it completes, a table showing the rollout order will be produced, and the Selection Date Flag Name and Site Rejection Flag Name flags will be updated for all candidates.
• Stop. This will stop the current site planner run. A table of results for the candidates evaluated so far will be displayed.
• Evaluate Planned Sites. This re-runs the site selection process on all planned sites.
• Impact Analysis. This generates a table showing the impact of each candidate site on the network as if it was activated in isolation of all other candidates.
• Update Selection Flags. This adds the default selection flags to all sites.