PTV Group - Logistics Forum

Posted: **Thu Oct 12, 2023 2:47 pm**

My colleague from France asked this:

I have a case for a prospect where he would be interested in xCluster for planning over a year.

The main point is :
“I can go from Monday to Friday, but if I go on Monday, then I won’t plan the next visit on Tuesday”.
So a frequency of 2 with several possible visit patterns, but not all the combinations.

From my understanding, VisitPatternOptions should answer.

Could you confirm ?
And, in addition, would you have any existing example of request using visitPatternOptions ?

Well, here's a nice visualization of an example:

keep in mind that the parameter VisitPatternOptions is a property of each individual customer. In my example the same value applies for all customers but the API is way more flexible!

: Here are 30 customers that are supposed to be visited in the two week cycle.

: The visit rhythm for each customer is "weekly".

: If the planning enforces the visits to be on "stable days"
(flexibleChoiceOfVisitPatterns==false) for each customer
you can see from the grid that all visits per line are
assigned to the same weekday (green)

: In the map this can be seen by "unique monday" (blue line)
because the tours on the first monday overlaps the tour of
the second monday.

: Now if a flexible planning is allowed (flexibleChoiceOfVisitPatterns==true)
the visits of a specific customer may be assigned to different
weekdays in different weeks yellow) - though some
customers may encounter a stable pattern (not guaranteed)

: In the map you can distinguish that there are different blue
tours, red tours and so on.

: Finally you can spot the difference in the KPIs when you
compare the two results: with a more flexible handling the
overall working time is smaller than with fixed patterns.