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