Latest Contributions by HeatherMoe

Hi Louwrens, I think if your orders do not have any day of the week constraints and you are just trying to minimize the number of routes that are needed for this we can simplify your problem quite a bit by taking the "day" out of the planning process and deciding afterwards which routes will be run on each day.   So for this on the orders you can just put the times (8am to 12pm) in without the date if using ArcMap or a GP tool to solve the problem.  If using a rest request then give all of the orders the same day and time when converting your problem to Milliseconds since epoch.  If the routes need to be contained within that same time frame you could even eliminate the order time windows all together and just rely on the start time of the route and the max total time values to restrict the work day to 4 hours.  Having the time windows is really just necessary if you allow the drivers some extra time to get from the depot to the first order or back after the last depot.  For example if they leave the depot at 7:30 and can get back at 12:30. For the routes, put in essentially five copies of the routes that you have for one day.  So for example if you have 6 vehicles available to you, then you will put in 30 total routes in the problem.  If you are able to get vehicles on demand to be able to cover all of the orders then you want to make sure you have enough vehicles in the problem to be able to get to all of the orders.  For example if your drivers can get to 20 stops in a day and you have 600 orders, you would need a minimum of 30 vehicles in the model but to be on the safe side add a few extra.  The solver will naturally try to minimize the number of vehicles used but it does have a multi value objective with other costs such as time and distance so you can add a fixed cost to the routes which would make the cost of starting a new route more expensive and less likely for the solver to add unnecessary routes.   This set up would divide all of the orders across the routes without regard to which day the route is to be driven.  Once you have the routes with orders, you can then decide which of them will be done on a specific day and divide the work across your five day time horizon.   If I am missing a requirement for pre-specifying the day for routes then let me know and we can work through ways to get the problem to work.   ... View more

Hi Peter, Glad to hear that you were able to get Option 1 working and that you are willing to try out Option 2.  From looking at the set up you showed in the picture, it looks like you still have the Assignment Rule set to PreserveRoute from working with Option 1.  If you set that to Override for all of your orders, you should then be able to solve without a sequence value being added manually.  Also for Option 2 you do not need to specify a RouteName any more.  That will be taken care of by the specialties.   Let me know if that works for you. ... View more

Hello, Although order pairs is a good way to solve this type of requirement, here is another option that might work.  It looks like from your request that you have five routes three of which are assigned to warehouse 1 and only use warehouse 1 as a route renewal and two that are assigned to warehouse 2 and only use ware house 2 as a route renewal.  If you will be continuing this separation of routes to a specific warehouse for starting and renewals then you could use specialties to make sure the orders that have to come from a specific warehouse are serviced by the routes that are from that warehouse. For example, in your problem you could have two specialties: Warehouse1 and Warehouse2.  For the orders that have to come from those specific warehouses give them the appropriate specialty.  Then mark the three routes from warehouse 1 with the specialty Warehouse1 and similarly for the two routes from warehouse 2 give them a specialty of Warehouse2.  This will force the orders that have to come from a specific warehouse to be serviced by one of the routes that comes from that warehouse but will allow the orders that do not need to come from a specific warehouse to be serviced by any route.   Let me know if this works to solve your problem or if you have any more questions.   Heather ... View more

I'm sorry, this is not a problem type we currently support with the VRP solver. ... View more

Xander's description of creating multiple orders that fit under the capacity limit is correct and the best workaround for this problem. Note: The following is only an additional option but not needed if it isn't a part of your business model. If you have all of your trucks the same you could also use a specialty for those duplicate orders and one truck so that the same truck delivers all of them with the renewals you already have set up.  That added complexity really is only needed if you have the business constraint of the same truck delivering all of the food to the supermarket.  In the example above from Xander you could make the first three have the specialty along with one truck and then the partial order could either be included with the same specialty in which case the same truck would also deliver the final portion but it would limit the optimization on the less then truck load runs.  Or you could leave the last partial order without the specialty which would allow for all of the less then truck load deliveries to be be considered on every truck to find the best way to deliver that part also.   ... View more