Truck Door Heights - VRP solver

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01-22-2022 04:28 PM
IhabElAttar
New Contributor II

Hello,

we use the ArcGIS Online VRP solver to route a fleet of  60+ vehicles and 12 different door heights. We are facing some challenges trying to model vehicle door heights using capacities. 

 

The Challenge can be described as follows:

 

Truck 1 has a door height of 78”

Truck 2 has a door height of 89”

Truck 3 has a door height of 96”

 

Order 1 has a pallet stacked 48” High

Order 2 has a pallet stacked 85” high

Order 3 has a pallet stacked 92” high

 

Truck 1 can only pick up Order #1

Truck 2 could pick up Orders 1 & 2

Truck 3 Can pick up all 3 orders.

 

We tried using Capacities to solve this, but it will only work if driver is picking up only 1 order at a time as it tries to add the heights together.  (48” + 85”) can’t be on the truck at the same time.

 

The only way I can think to solve this is to use Specialties, but that makes for a very long list of specialties.  Especially if the fleet is larger.  

With the above example we would have to use the following specialties:

 

                96andbelow

                89andbelow

                78andbelow.

 

Truck 1 would only have the following:

                “78andbelow”

Truck 2 would have the following:

                “89andbelow 78andbelow”

Truck 3 would have to have all 3 listed:

                “96andbelow 89andbelow 78andbelow”

And then the orders themselves would need to be classified accordingly.

In our current fleet where we have  60+ vehicles and 12 different door heights using specialties to address this does not sound like a practical solution. Is anyone aware of any other setting or workarounds to model this in the vrp solver ?

 

Thanks,

Ihab 

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1 Reply
HeatherMoe
Esri Contributor

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.

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