Routing for an 8-hour workday

[DeniseBeckham]

Hello,

   I am trying to figure out how to use network analyst to create routes for food inspectors.  There are thousands of facilities within the county that need to be inspected.  We have a database that has all of the facilities in it and lets the inspectors know which facilities are due for inspections.  Each of the inspectors has a zone that they're in charge of, so we don't need to use a vehicle routing problem.  I can pull facilities that are due for a given inspector.  

   Let's say there are about 100 facilities due that an inspector needs to get done in the next month.  I can set time windows and specify how long each stop will take.  However, some stops might take 5 minutes for the inspector to drive to while others might take the inspector over an hour to drive to.  Is there a way to set a route and only include the maximum number of stops that the inspector can make within an 8-hour period, including stop time drive time?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Denise

[HeatherMoe · Accepted solution]

Hello Denise,

Although you point out VRP isn't needed for identifying which inspector is go to each facility, it has some added features that I think would be helpful for your problem.  You can run the VRP problem with just a single route and then it is essentially just optimizing the single route's sequence like the route solver.  By doing this, within the VRP solver you can specify on the Routes feature class that the route is only to visit x number of facilities by using the MaxOrderCount field.  You could also specify that the MaxTotalTime is 8 hours and restrict the total length of the workday.  

Another option that you might consider if you have 100 facilities that a single inspector is to visit for the month.  You could run this whole problem as a single VRP model and better optimize the distribution of facilities being visited throughout the entire month.  To do this simply put a route in for each day the inspector is going to work.  If some of the facilities have specific day of the week type constraints on top of the time window they are available this can be modeled with the specialties.  If this is something you are interested in you could watch the second demo presented in this video on optimizing routes for two drivers for a week within one problem.  This demo starts at 13:25 on the video.  

Hope this helps,

Heather Moe

[DeniseBeckham]

Heather, 

This helps a lot! Thank you!

Denise