I was just asked by a community member how xTour deals with input plans in case of existing violations such as TourViolations. The fellow expected xTour to be able to resolve the violation(s) and to optimize afterwards. But: this isn't the case and therefore I'd like to provide some simple statements about input plans. This should enable you to understand some principles of xTour
The following statement therefore refers to transactions with a non empty input plan (e.g. at least one tour of at least one single vehicle).- Before xTour starts the optimization itself it evaluates the given input tours for each chain that is part of the input plan:If at least one single tour of a vehicle is corrupt the whole chain is marked as corrupt. This vehicle is therefore not touched by the optimization. Any assigned order remains on this vehicle. Violations will remain on the tours.
- In other words: xTour will not resolve such conflicts automatically. The potential of optimization is therefore reduced to
- vehicles without input tours
- vehicles with violation free input tours
- We recommend to inform a user about violations so he can decide how to resolve the conflicts (enlarge time intervals, assign ressources with sufficient skillsets or capacities...). After the manual resolution a new optimization approach is meaningful.
Best regards
Bernd