Latest Contributions by HeatherMoe

Hi David, I had another thought on how you could solve against a subset of the problem, using our Assignment Model. For VRP the Orders table has a field called Assignment Rule. One of the coded value domains there is "Exclude" which can be used to remove the order from the solve without removing it from the layer. This can be used one of two ways if it was already assigned to a route. If the whole route and all of the orders are excluded then all you need to do is set Exclude for all of the orders and similarly Exclude for the AssignmentRule field on the corresponding Route. If only a few of the assigned orders are being excluded then the RouteName and Sequence fields would also need to be cleared to <Null> otherwise it will return an error message. For Last Mile Delivery the Orders field also has a field called AssignmentRule but the coded value domain is slightly different. In this case you would set it to "Unassign." In this case it does not matter if the route has a RouteName assignment or not, we will not solve. ... View more

We have added this capability to the Last Mile Delivery Solver. We do not plan to make this same adjustment to the VRP. ... View more

This tutorial and this presentation video might be helpful for learning how to take your street data and make it a network dataset.    As for distinguishing between street and alley deliveries, Network Analyst solvers will locate to the closest street geographically unless you prepopulate the location fields. Here is some documentation on the locating story.  ... View more

There is currently no way to switch the schema version within the ArcGIS Pro UI. However, you could use a python script with the arcpy.nax module. This allows both schema options within the ArcGIS Pro install.    This sounds like a very interesting use case could you describe it more and why you need so many dimensions to the quantities being delivered. Maybe we could suggest a different modeling to get similar solutions.  ... View more

Since you are wanting the drivers to return home each day, I would suggest a different set up using multiple routes for each driver instead of breaks.  To designate the territories you have two options, you can use specialties or Route Zones. Either will allow you to keep the drivers to going only to the appropriate locations. (Of course since there is no overlap between orders being serviced by different drivers you could also separate them into different solves all together.  For each drive you would create multiple routes for the different days they would drive starting and ending at their home location for each route. These could be designated as Zemin_Monday and Zemin_Tuesday for example. They would have the MaxTotalTime constraint of 480 minutes. This will allow the orders to be separated into different day's worth of work an make loops back to the home location instead of a long string of orders leaving the driver at some random location.  ... View more

Hello, I'm not quite following your questions. We allow just one depot name for the starting depot on a route. If you are not sure how many routes should start from each depot you can start more then enough from each depot and the solver will only start the number of routes from each depot that is needed.   As for the capacity of the buses, for each route you can indicate how many people can be on the bus by using the capacity fields and indicate the number of people at the stops with the quantity fields. The DepotVisits will then give a summary of the quantity that were assigned to the route.   If this does not answer your questions can you explain more about what you are trying to do and where you are running into problems.   ... View more

That is a very interesting problem to try and model. The VRP solver does not have a way to provide different service times based on the route that services it.  I would suggest trying the problem twice. One time with the order service times reflecting the time for a route with a single driver and just routes that have the single driver. The other time with the order service times reflecting the time for a route with more than one employee in the vehicle and the routes that match. You might be able to get some insight from this on the cost benefit of the extra employee. The other thought I have (completely untested) is to use overtime to make a decision if a route would be better with a second person or not. So the thought is you have a general idea of how much time across a workday could be saved if there were two people in the vehicle vs one. Use that information to set up the routes so they can go past the typical work day by that amount and have overtime start at the end of the typical day. The added cost of the additional driver could be reflected by the overtime (probably not needed to fully model the true cost). Then for routes that use overtime assign those to vehicles with an extra person and routes that do not use overtime assign it to vehicles with just the driver. You could then use the preserve route assignment model and adjust the service times to get a view of the expected workday for each route if that final information is needed.  Would love to hear what you end up trying and how it goes. ... View more

If an order has a specific truck that must pick it up you can use the assignment rule "Preserve Route" and then assign the appropriate route to RouteName. If you are using older versions of the software you will also have to assign a sequence value for that order. If an order has a few of the trucks that it can be picked up by but not others then I would recommend giving it a specialty such as "TruckWithLadder." Trucks that meet that same criteria are also given that same specialty. This ensures that only those trucks are able to pick up that order.  ... View more

Hello, We did a presentation on the use of those two overrides. You can see the slides here and the presentation here. As for the input for the REST API you would pass {"RSPPenaltyFactor": "10"} with the curly brackets and everything inside.  From your question I am guessing you are working on a high density VRP problem. I would love to know more about your use case.  ... View more

I am having a hard time understanding your question. Could you provide some more details about what you are doing and the problem you are trying to solve?  Things that would be helpful: - What tool are you using when routing on the web? - What are you switching to when you download the route plan? I don't understand how you are finalizing the plan. - Are you using the Vehicle Routing Problem layer, Plan Routes, VRP Rest API or some other tool? - Are the vehicles only allowed to go to orders in the route zones? Or is that just a preferred territory? - Do you have route renewals set up for the problem?   ... View more

I am having a hard time understanding your question. Could you provide some more details about what you are doing and the problem you are trying to solve?  Things that would be helpful: - What software are you using when you say desktop? ArcGIS Pro or ArcMap? - What prevents you from translating this to Rest API  - Are you using the Vehicle Routing Problem layer, Grouping Analysis, or some other tool? - How many routes are there? - How many orders are there? - What is the order priority based on? The quantity associated with the order?  - Are you solving multiple days at once or taking the unassigned orders from the previous day and adding them to the current solve? ... View more

I am having a hard time understanding your question. Could you provide some more details about what you are doing and the problem you are trying to solve?  Things that would be helpful: - What software are you using? (ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Pro, etc) - Are you using the Vehicle Routing Problem layer, Plan Routes, VRP Rest API or some other tool? - How many routes are there? - How many orders are there? - What makes the order count increase rapidly? - Are you solving multiple days at once or taking the unassigned orders from the previous day and adding them to the current solve? ... View more

That data was very helpful for understanding this issue. At the fundamental level this is two problems, one which is assigning stores to routes (the Assignment Model) and then a routing problem to sequence the assigned orders. We do not specifically solve the assignment model but brainstormed a few ways that it could be approximated. Here are some options for determining which driver should visit each store. 1. Choose the day with the largest overall quantity and solve that day first. Then lock the orders to the specific drivers with either the assignment rule suggested above or using a specialty that pairs those routes and orders together and solve the next largest quantity day and so on until you have assigned all stores to a driver. 2. For the initial solve have a single order for each store and set the quantity value to the highest for that store location. That might be Monday's quantity for one store but Thursday's quantity for a different store. This first solve would give you the route assignments for each store. Then for each day of the week use specialties to require a store be visited by it's assigned route. This will give you the sequencing of orders for that day. 3. Similar to option 2 but instead of the highest quantity value add them all up and use the sum for the quantity of that location. Also set the route capacity to five times the normal capacity value. None of these options are perfect but hopefully one can work well enough for you to get some improved optimization for your problem.  ... View more

This is a very interesting use case. We don't have methods that allow it to be solved with just a single solve but I have seen other periodic routing problems solved successfully with a series of solves. This requires solving for a portion of the problem and then locking those orders to the route and adding in the next part of the problem for another solve. For example The first solve of the problem could look at how to divide up the work that is done daily to the different drivers. This could be done with having one order for every location that has an every day visit requirement. For routes include just a single route for each of the drivers. Once this work is divided then the order locations that need to be visited periodically can be added into the problem and the routes expand to show the drivers and day of the week. With each successive solve the orders that are already routed are kept in the problem and given an AssignmentRule of PreserveRoute and the new ones that are to be assigned have an AssignmentRule of override.  I'm not able to give too much more advice on the second portion of this yet, because it would depend on the requirements of the periodic routing. For the twice a week locations can they be visited any two days of the week or do you need a required separation between visits such as it could only be Monday/Thursday or Tuesday/Friday or would Monday/Tuesday be okay? Similar questions for the three times a week locations and four times a week locations. Once you have the different options listed out then you would be able to figure out how best to solve the second portion of the solve.  For example if the twice a week locations must be either Monday/Thursday or Tuesday/Friday then you could solve the problem with just deciding if it will be visited on Monday or Tuesday. You would have routes for double the number of drivers (Driver1_Monday, Driver1_Tuesday, Driver2_Monday, Driver2_Tuesday, ...) TThe every day orders would be duplicated and given a route assignment matching the Monday and Tuesday routes for that driver it was assigned in the first solve. And the twice a week orders would be added into the problem with an assignment rule of override. This would allow the solver to divide up the work between the drivers and the days of the week. If it is assigned to Driver1_Monday then you know it will also be on Driver1_Thursday's route and so when solving for the next set you can include an order for that day and lock it to that route with the AssignmentRule.  ... View more