Latest Contributions by HeatherMoe

Hello, The Query for the Feature Locator Where Clause is for limiting the network edges on which the stops can be located. So to solve the problem one zone at a time you will need to break the orders feature class up by the different zones. It sounds like you have a very big problem. Are you solving for a really large geographic area or do you have a high density of order locations (such as every house)? Heather ... View more

You are correct that a VRP analysis can only use one travel mode at a time. By restricting the problem to just a single travel mode when in reality there are two vehicle types, one with a more restrictive set up then the other, I see two different things that might need to be worked around. The first is that some orders simply can not be reached by the more restrictive vehicle because to get to that order the vehicle must drive on a street that it is not allowed. To overcome this I would first solve the problem with the more restrictive of the travel modes. Any orders that are unreachable by the vehicles with that travel mode will need to be visited by the other vehicle and all the others can be visited by either vehicle type. Then solve the VRP with the less restrictive travel mode and use specialties to restrict the orders that must be on the less restrictive vehicle. The second thing that will need to be considered is the final route paths being optimized for the specific travel mode. To do this once the VRP analysis is done, the route paths can be rerun using the Route solver to get the best path for each travel mode. The VRP analysis will already be done with one of the travel modes so only the routes that will be driven by the other vehicle type will need to be rerun.  Hope this helps, Heather  ... View more

Hi Justin, I'm all for keeping hair on heads instead of on the floor. Let's see if we can get your model working well again. I again see two options depending on a few settings and preferences for you.  1.) Since you liked the route zone option you could again go with this defining a region for each truck and have multiple copies of that polygon for each of the minor routes you are making for that truck to divide the work among days and morning/afternoon. This might run into similar skipped orders or routes overlapping each other within the region but they would then at least all be done by the same driver and only require defining three zones. 2.) The other options is to use dynamic seed points. This will tell the solver to emphasize clustering orders onto routes based on geographic regions so they are better clustered into regions over looking for the minimum cost. It usually does a really good job of minimizing cost also but just so you understand the difference in the emphasis for the heuristic with this setting. This is set up differently depending on how you are solving the problem. If you are using an ArcMap VRP layer you will need to add a point feature for each of the 30 routes into the map in the feature class called Route Seed Points. It does not matter where these points are, they just have to be in the map and the solver will move them around to the best location for the center of that cluster. You will need to specify the RouteName and then make SeedPointType set to Dynamic for all of them. If you are using the Solve Vehicle Routing Problem GP tool, or one of the ways to call a service then simply make sure that Spatial Cluster Routes is set to True. This will not put any emphasis on keeping the trucks in the same region for all 10 of the minor routes for days and morning/afternoon. If they are all essentially the same you could not predefine which route goes for which truck and then look at the output afterwards and group the routes to trucks based on what is close by geographically. Let me know if you have other questions, Heather ... View more

Hi Justin, Great question. There are a few options for requiring the routes to go back to the depot for a break and they each have their benefits so It might be worth trying both to see what works best for you (and we would love feedback on what you end up doing).  1.) One option is to break the work day into multiple routes per person setting the time portions of those routes appropriately for the time of day such as Justin_Morning has a start time of 8 am and a max total time of 2 hours, Justin_LateMorning has a start time of 10:15 am and a max total time of 1.75 hours, Justin_afternoon has a start time of 1:00 pm with a max total time of 2.75 hours, and Justin_LateAfternoon has a start time of 3:00 pm and a max total time of 2 hours. The start and end depot for all of them would be back at the office forcing the routes for each driver to go back to the office for a morning break, lunch break, and afternoon break. One concern for this is that it will grow the size of the problem substantially, so this works well for smaller fleets but if you have a large problem to begin with it could make the problem too large. This should still do a good job of filling up the routes to get work done efficiently. 2.) Another option when needing a break to take place at a specific location is to insert it as an order. You can use the TimeWindowStart1, TimeWindowEnd1, and MaxViolationTime1 fields to indicate the time of the break and the ServiceTime to indicate how long it is. You will need one order for each route for each break that is needed and then can pair each with the route using the specialties. So following the example above you would have three orders Justin_MorningBreak, Justin_LunchBreak, and Justin_AfternoonBreak with the appropriate time windows. They would each be given and OrderSpecialties value of Justin and then the route Justin would have a RouteSpecialties of Justin. If you see that the solver is not assigning these orders which is a possibility if you have too much work for the day, then I would add in a revenue value for these orders that is more then the revenue for other orders in the problem combined, that will signify to the solver to definitely go to that order. Hope that helps, Heather ... View more

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   ... View more

1. We have scenario based workflow documentation on our to do list and School Bus routing is on the top. 2. There are not other multi settings behaviors for paired orders.  3. Package delivery with some orders having time windows can create situations where it could be useful to offload some packages but not all. Such as a bulky package being delivered earlier then the small package that has a time window late in the day could open up some carrying capacity for that route. Thanks, Heather ... View more

I'm not sure why the solver is not emptying the bus when visiting the schools from the descriptions. It would be helpful to have a look at the data to be able to troubleshoot this more. I would recommend opening a support issue for this so we can securely transfer data. I will work with them to look at the data. Thanks, Heather  ... View more

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  ... View more

Hello, What is described by Anna is still accurate for the VRP Solver. It uses a time-neutral travel time for solving and that is what is returned in the NA classes. The directions will reflect the traffic if included in the network dataset. Thanks, Heather  ... View more

Hi Daniel, A few questions about the set up of your problem. Are you using order pairs? The excess_transit_factor being set to High will only be relevant if using order pairs.If you have order pairs it might be passing a location because it has not picked up the first in the pair. By saying equal time windows do you mean that all orders have exactly the same time windows (such as 8:00 am to 5:00 pm)? If this is the case you should be able to remove the time windows from the orders and put the constraints into the Route using the earliest and latest start time parameters to say the beginning of the time window and the max total time to indicate the ending of the time window. I suggest this because taking time windows out of the orders (even with them all the same) indicates to our solver that it can go through the algorithm steps for a non time window case which is an easier problem to solve. This might improve the results some.  If instead you mean that the time windows are of equal duration such as 2 hour time windows then maybe the time window hasn't been reached and so it is best to pass by the order and get it later instead of waiting. Thanks, Heather Moe ... View more

Hello, Order pairs is how we have mostly seen school bus routing accomplished in the past. I would have expected with the order pairs that all that are on the bus at the time it reaches the location of drop-off that everything would be "delivered" or bus emptied. A few thoughts on this. Do you have an order pair set up for each student, the pickup location at home (or near home) and the drop-off location at the school? This will have several locations overlapping at the school. Do you have any time windows on the second order in the order pair? If an order has a time window after when the bus arrives there the first time it would stay on the vehicle.  Thanks, Heather Moe ... View more

Hello, Thank you very much for your interest. We are planning a demo on school bus routing and will work to include as many of your topic points as we can.  Thanks, Heather ... View more

Hi Ihab, The CostPerUnitDistance and CostPerUnitTime values are used by the VRP solver during its solving both with multiple routes or just a single route in the problem. For the single route case it will be used in the sequencing of orders and for the multi route case it is used in both deciding which route the order is assigned to as well as the sequencing of the routes.  Yes increasing the CostPerUnitDistance above the CostPerUnitTime will influence the solver towards options with lower distances if possible considering the other constraints in the problem such as time windows and maximum route constraints. Hope this helps, Heather  ... View more

Hello, The only other route limiting parameter that Plan Routes has is the total time for the route. You might be able to limit things using that as an approximation but that would probably take a lot of trial and error to get a distance constrained problem. The better option is to switch to using the full Vehicle Routing Problem solver. This allows the routes to be constrained by distance directly. You can still access this through your ArcGIS Online account but instead of using the Plan Routes tool, you make a REST Request. This tutorial should help you get started with it. Route multiple vehicles | ArcGIS for Developers  ... View more