What VRP problem types are you modeling?

[HeatherMoe]

The VRP Solver can be configured to solve many different fleet routing problems.  What are you using it for?

[HeatherMoe]

Hi Victor,

That sounds like an interesting problem. You could try making the route zone for an area that surrounds the city's downtown and goes far enough out into the suburbs to cover all of the orders leaving a hole in the route zone for the downtown area.

Heather 

[VictorPoliak]

Thanks Heather for your response.

I can do that, I will try it.

I hope that someday there will be a specific solution to this problem,

because big tracks can go far from the city, too.

Now I should define zones as big as the whole country except downtowns

Regards,

Victor

[foodforgoodffg]

At present, we have two trucks that collect kitchen waste and they need to do the job at night. Each truck has a maximum capacity for 12 waste containers and there are 20 kitchen waste points which have from 40 to 20 waste containers respectively. The starting point is the same as the ending point. When arcgis desktop is used for drawings, two problems happen.
1 the work assigned for certain kitchen waste collection points are from 23: 00 a.m. to 25: 00 a.m., but arcgis does not recognize the timeline as according to it, the latest end point should be 23:59:59,  but we do have to work at night.
2, If the route is well arranged and a truck is arranged to collect 40 containers of kitchen waste, how can it be arranged to continue collecting the remaining kitchen waste? (For example, when the truck takes away the first 12 containers, how should the remaining 28 be dealt with?). At present, some points cannot be well scheduled because the trucks’ carrying capacity is set up to be 12 containers. If I make their capacity to be 100 containers, all routes will be formed immediately.   I have seen some of your topics: 1, for a point with 40 containers, it is supposed to divide them  at the same place to orders of  12 containers by 3, plus an order of 4 containers. But when the capacity of the truck is fixed to be 12 containers, it still will not work.  I tried to add vechiles in a virtual manner, namely, I added A A1, A2, A3 vehicles virtually to the plan when we only have A and B in reality, and I set the starting point the same as the original starting point, it turned out to be irrational. Do you have any other good way to do this?
3 If I am going to set the end point of the recycling process not as the same starting point, but another point in the schedule before 9:30 PM, and then, after 9:30 PM , I want to set the end point back as the very starting point, how should I do it?

[HeatherMoe]

This sounds like an interesting problem. I think we should be able to address your three concerns.

1.) When working over night, it is important to add date information as well as time. So for example you have collection points from 23:00 to 25:00 am, if you add date information into that you would instead input this as 01 June 2020 23:00 am to 02 June 2020 01:00. This lets the solver know that it is a two hour time frame that just happens to span across midnight. If the actual date isn't of importance to you just pick dates that are representative of when you normally run these routes such as spanning from Monday to Tuesday.

2.) When a vehicle can pickup a load from orders, empty the vehicle, and then go back out to more orders, we use route renewals to model the emptying the vehicle. For this you will need to add in the location that the vehicles can be emptied into the depot feature class if it is not already in there. Then add in information in the Route Renewals table. You will need a row for each of your vehicles. You can find more information about Route Renewals in our doc, here. It is important to note that the solver assumes that it can empty the vehicle at the end of the day at the ending depot so if you need to empty the vehicles else where, make that location the ending depot.

3.) I am not sure I full understand this question. If you are saying you would like a way to route the vehicles back to the starting location after emptying out the vehicles, that would best be done as a separate solve using the Route solver. If you are asking for a time dependent ending location (point A if before 9:30 and point B if after 9:30) that is not something our solver currently supports. I think the way I would handle this is to leave the ending depot blank (you have to have a starting depot to do this as we require at least one of the start depot and end depot). This will stop the route at the last order location. You could then determine which ending depot you would like the vehicle to return to and determine that path using the route solver. Alternatively you could solve the VRP problem twice, once using point A as the ending depot and once using point B as the ending depot. Then when looking at the results look at which is correct based on your time restrictions. 

Hope this helps,

Heather