use weak time windows

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columbs
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Joined: Fri Oct 07, 2016 8:21 am

use weak time windows

Post by columbs »

Hello everybody,

is it possible to use weak time windows in xTour server? I mean: I have 10 customers to deliver from 14:00 till 16:00 (hard time windows), but I could in some case also deliver till 17:00, if no feasible solution can be found. I that case I want to minimise the use of the tolerance time.
Is the functionality already available? or maybe in a next version?

Thank you in advance and best regards from Switzerland,
Sebastiano
Intertour strategy is my religion
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Bernd Welter
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Re: use weak time windows

Post by Bernd Welter »

Hello Sebastiano,

we do this in Smartour but then it simply opens the time interval [ from ; till ] to [ from-buffer ; till+buffer ] within a second transaction. So it is some kind of business logic around the planBasicTours calls.

Best regards,
Bernd

PS: I'll forward this to DEV
Bernd Welter
Technical Partner Manager Developer Components
PTV Logistics - Germany

Bernd at... The Forum,LinkedIn, Youtube, StackOverflow
I like the smell of PTV Developer in the morning... :twisted:
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melsner
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Re: use weak time windows

Post by melsner »

Hi,

is there any progress regarding this topic?
We just got questions from two different customers who want to use xTour-planSequence with time windows, and they want the tour to be calculated even if not all time windows can be matched.
Of course we could call xTour twice, passing explicit time windows in the first call, and omitting them in second call, if the first one failed, but that's a bad solution; we would have to ensure that the second call is only done if the time windows are the bottleneck, not working times or other restrictions; and we would have to use the interface twice, making calculation even slower.

Best regards
Martin
Martin Elsner

Senior consultant
inconso GmbH
Joost
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Re: use weak time windows

Post by Joost »

Side note:

Do not use planSequence but planBasicTours in this case. The result of planbasicTours is better if there are heterogeneous time windows.
Joost Claessen
Senior Technical Consultant
PTV Benelux
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Bernd Welter
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Re: use weak time windows

Post by Bernd Welter »

Hello there,

Generic recommendation: https://xserver.ptvgroup.com/forum/view ... ?f=6&t=640

About the weak time windows: I do not expect a server side feature which offers some weakness in the handling of time intervals. The time intervals are hard constraints.

About the iterative approach:
Take a look at the UnscheduledOrderAnalysis to determine why an order remained unscheduled. Maybe you can use this info to determine how to approach the second call.

Best regards,
Bernd
Bernd Welter
Technical Partner Manager Developer Components
PTV Logistics - Germany

Bernd at... The Forum,LinkedIn, Youtube, StackOverflow
I like the smell of PTV Developer in the morning... :twisted:
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melsner
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Re: use weak time windows

Post by melsner »

Hello Joost and Bernd,

thanks for your help.
Then we will check if a double call is possible.
We still use planSequence as there was no need to upgrade to planBasicTours until now. But I will have a look into the API, to check if we could benefit from the differences.

Best regards
Martin Elsner

Senior consultant
inconso GmbH
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