PTV Group - Logistics Forum

Dear,

is there a way in xTour2 to force the engine to plan the pickups preferably more to the end of the tour?

Because in pallet distribution if you do a pickup in the beginning of the tour, you have to move the collected pallets the whole day to unload the rest, because you can only load/unload from the back of the truck and the collected pallets are in front of the pallets for delivery.

In xTour1 I could force this by setting maxTransportPeriod on the collection orders, based on the number of pallets I could restrict the transit time so the engine had to plan them more to the end. Putting 1 pallet out of the way is less of a problem then moving 5 on each stop.

Hello Peter,

currently I don't see any dedicated parameter for this usecase. But my thoughts are

• In xTour 1 we recommended to use the tourSection to enforce pickups being positioned at the end of tours (anyway: I like the way you approached it)
• Another xPlayer asked something similar few days ago and we mentioned to define a reduced quantity (e.g. 27 palettes instead of 33). This will ensure that there's always some space to move between the palettes.

As with the other task you mentioned these days: forwarded to DEV to gather some more ideas.

Best regards,
Bernd

PS: what did Joost recommend?

confirmed by DEV:
requires TourSection which isn't available so far (FEB 2019)

Bernd,

thanks for the answer. I'm migrating to xTour2, I'll shedule a meeting with Joost in the coming weeks after we have done some more tests with actual data.

Reducing the quantities is a solution, but this also has an efficiency impact on the trips without pickup orders. For now I will let the engine plan freely and have the planners if needed re-plan the pickups by using the MoveOrdersAction with InsertionAfterSpecifiedPosition.