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Autopilot

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Autopilot is an event automation feature for automatically opening, closing, awarding, and terminating rounds and event stages. Sourcing Optimizer’s Autopilot Bot performs these actions based on your event schedule configuration.

Autopilot area
Figure 1. Autopilot area

You can enable and disable Autopilot on the Schedule page using the Autopilot toggle switch.

After you configure your event schedule using Autopilot, you can review the schedule and planned Autopilot actions by clicking Review autopilot agenda.

Autopilot configuration

A key feature of Autopilot enables you to choose a Preferred scenario that Autopilot uses to automatically determine the award allocation when a round completes. This removes the need to manually award each round on the Award page and enables more dynamic rounds and multi-round stages.

Autopilot - Round configuration
Figure 2. Autopilot — Round configuration

The default Preferred scenario is Low Cost Baseline. However, you can configure customized scenarios specific to your business goals. For more information on configuring scenarios, see the Scenarios section.

With Event stages enabled, Autopilot offers more powerful event schedule configurations. The following example shows two stages of an event schedule using Autopilot and Event stages. For more detailed information on configuring Event stages, see Event stages.

Autopilot - Event stages configuration
Figure 3. Autopilot — Event stages configuration

Example explained:

  1. Single round: The first stage in the example is a single round that runs for one day with an automatic award based on the Low Cost Baseline scenario.
  2. Multi-round stage: The second stage is a multi-round stage that runs for one day but with a more advanced configuration.
  3. Bidding starts: The stage is configured to begin at 06.00 UTC.
  4. Round duration: Each round lasts two hours, and there is an hour interval before the next round of the stage begins. If you enable and configure feedback settings, this interval between rounds provides bidders the opportunity to review the feedback before the next round begins.
  5. Bidding ends: There will be at least three rounds but there may be up to five rounds. We configure the Minimum active bidders in round condition to close the bidding early if there are fewer than two active bidders. If this condition is met in any round after the minimum three rounds have passed, the stage closes early; if not, there can be up to five rounds, because the event is scheduled to close at 11.59 UTC.
  6. Preferred scenario: Autopilot evaluates and awards the winner based on the chosen scenario, One winner per origin.

If required, you can pause Autopilot during an event by setting the Autopilot toggle switch to Paused on the Dashboard tab of the Activity page in the Bid menu. You can also view a history of Autopilot actions on this tab by clicking View autopilot history.

If the Autopilot Bot no longer has an action to perform in the schedule or cannot proceed due to scenario infeasibility or other issues, it will pause itself and notify you by email that there is an issue that must be resolved before it can resume.