Vehicle Routing Problem - Travel entire street segment?

[TravisPenland]

I am working on creating new garbage routes for our sanitation department.  If possible, I would like to create a setting so the route must travel the entire street segment.  Right now, the results I am getting route the trucks to turn around mid-street, and this is just not a practical solution.  Is there any way to create this setting in the network dataset?  Thanks!

[RobertGarrity]

Hello,
Although the VRP solver isn't really designed for garbage routing, you may be able to solve your problem by setting the curbApproach of orders to "No U-Turn". This forces the vehicle to continue going in the direction it was going when it arrived at the order.

Here's a topic on CurbApproach: http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/#/U_turn_policies/004700000055000000/

Robert

[TylerWilson1]

I'm a student who has been working on a snow plow route optimization project for months now and I haven't been able to find a perfect solution for routing similar to garbage routes. Are you using many stops on each street to design your routes?

If you make any progress with your routes I would really like to hear about it!

[JaySandhu]

See my reply to your other post on stop priority.
Jay Sandhu

[TravisPenland]

Hi Tyler,

I read jsandhu's response to your other post (on stop priority) and am curious to hear if you have tried his suggestion.

Yes, we are using many stops on each street to model our routes; however, we were finding that the solver was not including all stops on a street when traveling down the segment and would instead visit the street two or more times in order to capture all of the stops.  This solution is obviously not practical.  So, I went through and just took a sample of our customers (selecting customers at street intersections and midsections of each segment) and set the NA options to not allow u-turns, and the solver improved the routes, but they still were not ideal. 

Let me know if you have made any more progress on this, thanks!

[TylerWilson1]

UPDATE:

Setting the curb approach of all of my stops to not allow U-turns (curbapproach = 3) has seemed to fix all of my problems in that regard.
Admittedly using the VRS in this manner is not "optimal" but it works none the less.

Thanks everyone that has posted on this issue.

-Tyler