Priorities in xCluster2.planVisits

[Bernd Welter]

Hi folks,

A partner wants to replave xTour1 with xCluster2 and evaluates the usage of the VisitOrder.Score for his purpose of how to prioritize orders over other orders if there's no solution planning all orders.

In xTour1 the priority property (values 0..9) was applied on a hierarchy under the iterative roof:
- create a tour planning as many prio 9 orders as possible (and forget the one's you couldn't plan)
- add as many prio 8 orders as possible (and forget those you couldn't add)
- add as many prio 7 orders as possible (and forget those you couldn't add)
- and so on

From my perspective a score is not the same as a prio.
Even if you give an order a very high score of e.g. 9 we may return a solution based on several orders of lower score if the tour's overall score is higher than a tour with the score9 order (plus some more).

So with a perspective of an iteration and different levels of importance the score does not guarantee to prefer the high score orders.

How would you recommend to handle the "order preference" in planVisits?

Bernd

[Bernd Welter]

and here comes the feedback from DEV (Thanks to Nitin):

• Each VisitOrder can be assigned a score corresponding to its importance. 
• The score can be between 1 and 100k, and it holds for all visits of the order.
• If workload restrictions allow, all visits of an order with score at least 10k will be planned opposed to visits of an order with score at most 10.
• If you want that all visits of a VisitOrder are served/planned, give it a score that is at least 50 times the score of the next best VisitOrder and set the workload restrictions accordingly.
• The software does not view scores as a hierarchy. That is, it does not necessarily first plan VisitOrders with score 10, then VisitOrders with score 9, and so on ... In other words, the software could choose/plan all visits of two VisitOrders with score 8 and leave out some visits of a VisitOrder with score 10.
• If your use case needs some kind of hierarchy of VisitOrders, the example here could help. Let us say you have three orders with priorities 3, 6 and 9. Now you want to serve all visits of order with priority 9. If there is still some space left in the schedule, you would want to serve as many visits of order with priority 6 and so on ....
  • Choose the workload options carefully.
  • Map order priorities to VisitOrder scores as follows
    • 3 -> 30
    • 6 -> 1000
    • 9 -> 50000