Tour Planing for a week with 2 (or more) jobs at a customer

[Wilhelm]

I would like to plan tours that will be handled every week. Some customers have to be handled twice (or even more). Is it possible to defined for those customers that they will be handled with 1 or 2 days in between (e.g. Monday and Wednesday/Thursday or Tuesday and Thursday/Friday or Wednesday and Friday). The planning should decide which combination is the best to be handled for every single customer.
I would like to do this with the xServer2.

[Bernd Welter]

Hello Daniel,

(reminds me of garbage collection, right?)

one of the core goals of a tour optimization is to minimize distances/drivuing times and this sounds like a contradfiction to your requirement: ensure specific dependencies between orders (visits). Therefore xTour itself won't solve this (at least not in a way you'd like to modell this).

But if your optimizatin call focuses on a single vehicle you should look at xCluster2.PlanVisitsRequest:

Based on the visitPatternOptions you can ensure that reoccuring visits of the same customer are keeping a minimum distance, e.g. you can specify that a visit is supposed to match one of the following patterns (based on your example):
- true, false, true, false, false, false, false = MON+WED
- true, false, false, true, false, false, false = MOND+THU
- false, true, false, true, false, false, false = TUE+THU
- false, true, false, false, true, false, false = TUE+FRI
- false, false, true, false, true, false, false = WED+FRI
Each pattern describes a valid combination of two visits at the same customer. The pattern stretches from MON to SUN, therefore includes the weekend (or excludes it as in each pattern SAT/SUN is set to false).

Once the orders / visits have been assigned to the optimal days following the given patterns you could apply a regular tour optimization based on xTour2.

Attention: obviously the strategic planVisist clustering does not consider capacities as a constraint. This might be a weakness of this approach - but as mentioned above: try to get familiar with the strengths of xCluster - it could help to come closer to your target.

There's a mighty showcase available in the admin page. Probably a bit too dramatic for what you'd like to achieve.Anyhow: feel free to return to me 1:1 so we could discuss a proper solution for you.

Best regards,
Bernd