Hello
I've been asked to provide an optimized routing soloution for the rubbish and recycling trucks in my district. I do not have access to the Routesmart extension so I've had to work with the Network Analyst 'Route' or 'Vehicle Routing Soloution' options.
So far I've had most success with the 'Route' option by manually creating polygons of the service areas, then intersecting this data to all of the city street corner house numbers, and then using the zones field from my manually created polygons to organise the days collections. This is essentially a table based system of solving the problem.
The problems are really starting to pile up though. My routes are certainly not the most efficient. I've lost all of my truck capacity functions, and although I am capable of routing trucks from the depot to the route, to the recycling centre, back to the route and then onto the depot again, I have no way of doing the drop offs intelligently. That is to say I lost most of the benifit of optimizing a route.
Does anyone have a soloution or any ideas?
p.s I have used the city street corners to try and remove some of the density from the problem. It would be more ideal to be able to use all of the street addresses as i would be able to calculate capacity more effectively...
Any thoughts would be appreciated...
Regards,
Lucas