Latest Contributions by HeatherMoe

I am having a hard time understanding your question. Could you provide some more details about what you are doing and the problem you are trying to solve?  Things that would be helpful: - What software are you using? (ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Pro, etc) - Are you using the Vehicle Routing Problem layer, Plan Routes, VRP Rest API or some other tool? - How many routes are there? - How many orders are there? - What makes the order count increase rapidly? - Are you solving multiple days at once or taking the unassigned orders from the previous day and adding them to the current solve? ... View more

That data was very helpful for understanding this issue. At the fundamental level this is two problems, one which is assigning stores to routes (the Assignment Model) and then a routing problem to sequence the assigned orders. We do not specifically solve the assignment model but brainstormed a few ways that it could be approximated. Here are some options for determining which driver should visit each store. 1. Choose the day with the largest overall quantity and solve that day first. Then lock the orders to the specific drivers with either the assignment rule suggested above or using a specialty that pairs those routes and orders together and solve the next largest quantity day and so on until you have assigned all stores to a driver. 2. For the initial solve have a single order for each store and set the quantity value to the highest for that store location. That might be Monday's quantity for one store but Thursday's quantity for a different store. This first solve would give you the route assignments for each store. Then for each day of the week use specialties to require a store be visited by it's assigned route. This will give you the sequencing of orders for that day. 3. Similar to option 2 but instead of the highest quantity value add them all up and use the sum for the quantity of that location. Also set the route capacity to five times the normal capacity value. None of these options are perfect but hopefully one can work well enough for you to get some improved optimization for your problem.  ... View more

This is a very interesting use case. We don't have methods that allow it to be solved with just a single solve but I have seen other periodic routing problems solved successfully with a series of solves. This requires solving for a portion of the problem and then locking those orders to the route and adding in the next part of the problem for another solve. For example The first solve of the problem could look at how to divide up the work that is done daily to the different drivers. This could be done with having one order for every location that has an every day visit requirement. For routes include just a single route for each of the drivers. Once this work is divided then the order locations that need to be visited periodically can be added into the problem and the routes expand to show the drivers and day of the week. With each successive solve the orders that are already routed are kept in the problem and given an AssignmentRule of PreserveRoute and the new ones that are to be assigned have an AssignmentRule of override.  I'm not able to give too much more advice on the second portion of this yet, because it would depend on the requirements of the periodic routing. For the twice a week locations can they be visited any two days of the week or do you need a required separation between visits such as it could only be Monday/Thursday or Tuesday/Friday or would Monday/Tuesday be okay? Similar questions for the three times a week locations and four times a week locations. Once you have the different options listed out then you would be able to figure out how best to solve the second portion of the solve.  For example if the twice a week locations must be either Monday/Thursday or Tuesday/Friday then you could solve the problem with just deciding if it will be visited on Monday or Tuesday. You would have routes for double the number of drivers (Driver1_Monday, Driver1_Tuesday, Driver2_Monday, Driver2_Tuesday, ...) TThe every day orders would be duplicated and given a route assignment matching the Monday and Tuesday routes for that driver it was assigned in the first solve. And the twice a week orders would be added into the problem with an assignment rule of override. This would allow the solver to divide up the work between the drivers and the days of the week. If it is assigned to Driver1_Monday then you know it will also be on Driver1_Thursday's route and so when solving for the next set you can include an order for that day and lock it to that route with the AssignmentRule.  ... View more

When first opening a project in ArcGIS Pro the default network data source is typically the portal you are signed into which for you is likely ArcGIS Online. It will automatically swap to a local network dataset if you add one to the map or you can change it from the Network Data Source button on the dropdown before selecting which layer type you would like to model. ... View more

The Fixed Location and Nearest Location ideas for breaks are very interesting. We will add these to the list of possible enhancements for our future improvements to VRP. ... View more

Allowing both a virtual start and a virtual end depot for a route is something on our enhancement plan. As we make updates to VRP we will be incorporating this change as well.  ... View more

The last two error messages are the ones that need to be fixed.    "Breaks (RouteName = "Route 1", Precedence = 1) and (RouteName = "Route 1", Precedence = 2) have overlapping time windows. Breaks (RouteName = "Route 2", Precedence = 1) and (RouteName = "Route 2", Precedence = 2) have overlapping time windows." The breaks need to be set up so that the time windows do not overlap. Breaks will start at any point within that time window and so having an overlap would mean both could be started at the exact same time.  ... View more

I can add this to our list of enhancement requests to consider. A bit of detail about the workflow or situation you are trying to accomplish with this would be helpful. Also, in your particular use case do you typically have multiple orders at the exact same location where that anchored first order might be at the same location as others such for school bus routing where several students start at a school and get dropped of back at their home bus stops.    In the mean time you could perhaps use a short time window that starts at the beginning of the route start time to encourage the solver to go to that order first.  ... View more

Something you might try to get all of the routes to be used in the first solve is to set the MaxOrderCount just over the value of (total known orders)/(Number of vehicles). So in your above example you know you will have 240 stops and 50 drivers which when divided would be 4.8 stops per route. However, since you are using order pairs round that up to 6 and this should activate most if not all of the routes and it gives some flexibility for some routes to use the full 6 orders and others only have 4 to help with the optimization.  ... View more

Specialties would be the best option for modeling the requirements of this but an alternative that I can think of would be to solve the problem in stages with decreasing door size. So the first solve would be for the largest doors and only the orders that can fit only on those vehicles. Once those assignments are made then then switch there assignment rule to preserve route and add in the next set of vehicles that are a size smaller and the orders that can only fit on those trucks or ones with larger doors. The newly added orders should have an assignment rule of override. This would incrementally lock the orders to routes as you move to smaller sizes. ... View more

One thought is you could have different "copies" of the routes with the various combinations of houses and trees to fit the scenarios you described above. The houses would be represented by the MaxOrderCount parameter on the route and the trees by the Capacity parameter. So if you have say 3 trucks available to you for the problem, you could set up three routes with a MaxOrderCount of 5 and Capacity of 10, another three routes with a MaxOrderCount of 4 and Capacity of 11, and three more with a MaxOrderCount of 3 and Capacity of 13. The solver will only use the number of routes needed for the problem so having extra routes shouldn't be a problem and it would allow the solver to decide what mix of MaxOrderCount and Capacity is best for the trucks. Having more then the actual number of trucks does make it possible that more routes will be used in the solution then you have vehicles. If you run into that for a problem you could experiment with the number of each route type that you present to the solver to see if it can find a solution with fewer routes going to more houses each. ... View more

That is an interesting question. Off setting the stops slightly might change the OD enough to give a different solution but it is hard to really say why the answer changes so much from just the pictures. I would suggest opening a ticket with support so we can dive into this further.  ... View more