PTV Logistics Product Forum

Hi there,

within SAP and PTV engines there's often a mix between components that apply for a proper solving of tour optimization tasks. I'd like to gather some core information about this topic in this article. As I am not a SAP guy by myself it would be great if you can return some valuable feedback about this topic - either 1:1 or as a response to the article.

Usually you have to approach a tour optimization problem via the following steps:

• Geocodes: Ensure to know the coordinates of each involved location, may it be a vehicle location, a depot or a customer facility... for this a geocoding engine is required. As this is a standard topic below tour optimization I won't dive into details here.
• Distances & traveltimes: Next step is to gather the travel times and distances from each involved coordinate to each involved coordinate. Usually this underlying data is called a distance matrix ([N rows] x [N columns]) or a flat relation table ([N²] rows). You may need several such structures if your fleet is based on vehicles with different means of transport, e.g. 40t trucks versus vans.
• Optimization itself: Once the traveltimes and distances are available the real optimization takes place. The involved algorithms may need to query the distance matrix aka the relation table millions of times even for small optimization sizes (<100 stops).

Now here's the comparison of some components of different parties:

Task	SAP	PTV xServer 2	PTV Developer
Distance / Traveltimes	Distance and Duration Determination (DDD)	PTV XDima2	Matrix Routing API (HERE) / Matrix Routing API (OSM)
Optimization	VSR Optimizer	PTV xTour2	Sequence Optimization API / Route Optimization API

And here are typical usage scenarions:

Scenario	Components
You have your own distances but want to benefit from a PTV Optimization engine	Upload the distances / traveltimes through xDima2 Use xTour2 to gather optimal tours
You don't have your own routing engine or optimizer	PTV Developer optimization APIs
You want to use SAP VSR Optimizer but need PTV routing?	Use PTV Developer Matrix Routing API to get traveltimes and distances upload them into the SAP system and use VSR Optimizer