PTV Group - Logistics Forum

Hi Experts,

I read this post: viewtopic.php?p=5109&hilit=optimization#p5109

And I reached the conclusion that for Tours calculation, if we do not have Costs maintained the optimization is done with distances and not with times, right?

Please check this thread "Tour Optimization a la PTV (driven by xTour2)"

It describes the generic approach towards "optimization in xTour2" which uses some abstract internal cost function in the traditional mode.
Since the acquisition of OPTIFLOW - which is 100% based on real cost factors - the monetary based optimization in xServer 2.29 was discontinued from v2.30...

Long story short: we try to schedule all workload with as few recources as possible producing as few kilometers/traveltimes as possible and so on...

PS: by the way: OPTIFLOW offers way more influencing factors than xTour2 ever offered!

Hi Bernd,

Thank you! So you mean, from 2.30, with this OPTIFLOW, there is a kind of "cost schema" which is taken into account for the calculations even we do not provide any cost stuff to API, right? Is there any kind of example of those default cost rules?

By the way, what is the meaning of "Head Version" ? Equal to current one?

Thank you in advance,

Hello Ignacio,

well - any optimization algorithm tries to minimize/maximize a target function. While OPTIFLOW and xServer 2.29 "Monetary" use values such as

• vehicle cost per kilometer
• driver cost per hour
• ...

the old school xTour2 uses abstract values you can hardly influence through the API calls. There are some parameters that control the comparison of two alternative solutions, e.g. the com.ptvgroup.xserver.xtour.TweaksToObjective
That's what I wanted to describe.

WHen it comes to HEAD versus other API versions please check the Versioning Guidelines
Long story short: the HEAD version is the server's lates built in version but for a proper access I recommend to refer to "number" versioned URLs.

Bernd