use weak time windows

[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

[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

[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

[Joost]

Side note:

Do not use planSequence but planBasicTours in this case. The result of planbasicTours is better if there are heterogeneous time windows.

[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

[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