Impact of noise to performance and planning quality

[Bernd Welter]

Hi there,

one of my partners does a tour planning with xTour2. I usually qualify each input order based on the response:

• RED : order is not planable at all - e.g. due to "no verhicle has sufficient capacity" or "no vehicle available on the order's locations opening hours". So the order's ID appears in the ToursResponse.orderIdsNotPlannable array.
• YELLOW : order appears in orderIdsNotPlanned but does not appear in the orderIdsNotPlannable array. Congratulations: the order has been sacrificed for the benefit of other orders. Add more resources to cope with the workload.
• GREEN: order is planned on one of the output tours.

Now the question that has been raised recently:
What if I ommit the RED orders from the input workload?

• Would this speed up the calcutation for the final result? (no timeout applies)
• What is the impact on the quality of the result?
• Does the engine identify the RED ones first and then process only the "not RED" ones without any difference?

What generic answers can we give to the player?

Bonus: Unscheduled Order Analysis
Longstory short: you can apply a more or less simple business logic to get more info about why a specific order is seen as yellow or red. Based on stored request ID.

• RED: Try to assemble a simple vehicleStart-Order-vehicleEnd tour for each vehicle and use the returned violations to get the causes.
• YELLOW: Try to place the specific order in each vehicle's input tour on each potential insertion position and check, what violations raise.

[Bernd Welter]

Response from DEV:

Shouldn't make a relevant difference whether the red ones are in the workload or not...

• "Would this speed up the calculation for the final result? (no timeout applies)" - Answer: "Not really, they are filtered out at the very beginning"
• "What is the impact on the quality of the result?" - Answer: "Not a lot."
• "Does the engine identify the RED ones first and then process only the "not RED" ones without any difference?" - Answer: "Yes"