Hi Heather! Thanks for the quick response - I really appreciate that!
So far I'm liking option 1, mostly because that's exactly the 'route' (lol) I was taking since writing yesterday! Knowing that our 3 trucks take approx. 5 days to complete their work, I'm setting things up such that there are 3 trucks x 2 runs (morning and afternoon, using a MaxTotalTime of 180 min for each) x 5 days (for now - but this can be expanded if Orders are not solved for, or vice versa), for a total of 30 Routes.
Well enough - but I'm now running into 2 issues which I hope to illustrate with this screen capture, after solving for Day 1 (reds = Route 1, greens = Route 2, blues = Route 3):
One is the Solver seemingly skipping what would seem to be obvious Orders, like those circled in Maroon. The other I call "the spaghetti factory", where the Solver entangles Routes while 'leap-frogging' over neighbourhoods, or placing Orders in a single street into different Routes (circled in fuchsia); or, by placing orders in wildly disparate areas (circled in teal). While I can somewhat understand how this could work in the real world, I know my clients prefer to give their crews discrete route areas. I'd used Route Areas in a previous version of this VRP to model just the 3 overall Routes and it did so beautifully and quickly (by an order of magnitude over solving without Route Zones!), but the thought of eyeballing clusters and then manually creating 30 Routes is....nope. I had just found this other thread where someone recommended using L-A :
but I've never used L-A before and I'm having trouble coming up with the correct usage of it to accomplish this. My most recent attempt was actually to use the ND_Junctions as Candidate Facilities, and solve for 30 clusters that have a cumulative travel cost of 180 minutes to surrounding demand points...?
I know there's a lot of things to cover here, but any help or points in the right direction would be life-saving - aaaand I'd get to keep my hair on my head instead of the floor around me lol!!!!
Thanks again Heather!