VisitPatternOptions

[Bernd Welter]

My colleague from France asked this:

I have a case for a prospect where he would be interested in xCluster for planning over a year.

The main point is :
“I can go from Monday to Friday, but if I go on Monday, then I won’t plan the next visit on Tuesday”.
So a frequency of 2 with several possible visit patterns, but not all the combinations.

From my understanding, VisitPatternOptions should answer.

Could you confirm ?
And, in addition, would you have any existing example of request using visitPatternOptions ?

Well, here's a nice visualization of an example:
keep in mind that the parameter VisitPatternOptions is a property of each individual customer. In my example the same value applies for all customers but the API is way more flexible!

Here are 30 customers that are supposed to be visited in the two week cycle.

The visit rhythm for each customer is "weekly".

If the planning enforces the visits to be on "stable days" (flexibleChoiceOfVisitPatterns==false) for each customer you can see from the grid that all visits per line are assigned to the same weekday (green)

In the map this can be seen by "unique monday" (blue line) because the tours on the first monday overlaps the tour of the second monday.

Now if a flexible planning is allowed (flexibleChoiceOfVisitPatterns==true) the visits of a specific customer may be assigned to different weekdays in different weeks yellow) - though some customers may encounter a stable pattern (not guaranteed)

In the map you can distinguish that there are different blue tours, red tours and so on.

Finally you can spot the difference in the KPIs when you compare the two results: with a more flexible handling the overall working time is smaller than with fixed patterns.