recently I've been asked whether our tour planning software is able to cover the following scenarios regarding the assignment of depots (parametrization of depotIdStart and depotIdEnd is mentioned below).
- Round trips - start and end of a tour is at the same depot (startDepotID==endDepotID, startDepotID>0). Driver gets back to the depot at the end of a tour.
- Open end trips - either tour starts at depot but ends at customer (startDepotID>0 and endDepotID==-1). Usually meaningful if the driver doesn't get paid for the final section from last customer back to the depot.
- Open start trips - either tour starts at a customer but ends at the depot (startDepotID==-1 and endDepotID>0). Usually meaningful if the driver doesn't get paid for the initial section from depot to first customer.
- Open trips - mixture of the scenarios above: start and end of a tour is somewhere at a customer (startDepotID==-1 and endDepotID==-1). Usually required if the driver doesn't get paid for the section from depot to first customer and his way from the last customer to the depot.
- Inter depot trips - tour starts at depot and ends at depot but the depots are different (startDepotID>0 and endDepotID>0 and startDepotID!=endDepotID)
I also attached some images that demonstrate the given tour structures.
Feel free to get back to me in case of questions,
Bernd