Multiple visits to the same customer in one tour

[ChristopherM]

Hello,

we have the requirement to plan tours for several days which might include multiple visits of one customer. Lets say we plan a tour from monday to friday and have one customer that has to be visited every two days. That means that we have to visit that customer multiple times in that tour. When we add multiple TransportDepots for this customer to the tour, the optimization places these visits next to each other in one day to save driving times. This makes total sense when trying to minimize the driving distance but does not satisfy our needs. Is there a way to define a minimal time span between multiple visits to the same address/Point/Depot in one tour?

Best regards,
Christopher

[Joost]

it can be done by first dividing the order over the days with xCluster, then to plan the days with xTour. Have a look at the xCluster use case description for planning a week:

https://xserver.ptvgroup.com/fileadmin/ ... n_Week.htm

[ChristopherM]

Thanks for your reply, Joost.
Just to make sure that I understood you correctly: I have to plan each day separately by calling the xTour server once for each day after I distributed the visits over the days using xCluster? Or is there a way to do this with one request?

Best regards,
Christopher

[Joost]

You can do it with one request. You just have to set the correct intervals for the opening times of the order.

[Bernd Welter]

Hello,

let's start with the story:

• you have several customers to visit in the next week
• some of these customers require more than one visit
• those visits should not occur on the same days but e.g. with at least 2 days "break" in between

If this is a proper description of the story you can use the two steps described by Joost:

• Use xCluster.planWeek or planMultiWeeks and assign rthe proper patterns for the customer, e.g.
  MON+THU or MON+FRI or TUE+FRI. This will assign such a multi visit customer to one of those patterns.
• Then you can optimize day per day using xTour

I know this is not the 100% solution of the story (if you expect 1 call solving all) bu it is a valid approach. The reason why xTour isn't able to resolve this on it's own is because the object model of xTour doesn't know dependencies between two orders (such as between Order 1Alpha and Order 1Beta there has to be a break of 48 hours).

About Joosts second comment with the operating intervals:
If you set the two orders to
order 1Alpha's opening times = MON+TUE
order 1Beta's opening times = THU+FRI a solution such as o1a is visited on MONDAY and O1b is visited on FRIDAY is valid. Imagine you want to enforce "the defect is 2 days" you might use xCluster patterns such as
MON+WED
TUE+THU
WED+FRI
to ensure the "period" between the visits is defined. This won#t be possible with the single call (due to the missing dependency between orders in xTour).

Best regards,
Bernd

PS: for a proper check I recommend to get in touch 1:1 with your local consultant