one of my partners is used to maxTransportPeriod on a xTour1.TransportAB. He optimizes the transport of persons in a medical context and these clients should not exceed an individual timeframe on the vehicle.
Afaik there's no dedicated successor in the Optiflow API (not yet?) and the workaround I see is to define bounding time intervals around the pickup or delivery locations of the underlying orders.
Is there a more elegant way?
Is there some dedicated parameter about to come?
Bernd
Bernd Welter Technical Partner Manager Developer Components
PTV Logistics - Germany
Bernd at... The Forum,LinkedIn, Youtube, StackOverflow
I like the smell of PTV Developer in the morning...
indeed the maxTransportPeriod is currently not supported in the same way in the Route Optimization Optiflow API.
Before going into more details on possible workarounds please note, that it is likely the feature will be available in the future. If this post is somewhat in the past, it is worth asking for an update in this thread, if there has not been one already.
Bernd basically already described the workaround in parts. As long as either the time slots for the delivery or the pickup is restrictive, we can work around this by making the time slots for the respective pickup or delivery equally restrictive.
In Transport Problems (depot unrelated) that case can be modelled quite exact. Say you want to model a maxTransportPeriod of two hours and a delivery time slot is 8:00 - 8:15. By defining a time slot on the pickup 6:15-8:15, you can ensure that the order will not be on any vehicle longer than two hours.
For depot related problems (VRP) it is a bit more tricky. Surely there are cases (for example if all deliveries have the same small time slot) that can be modelled in a similar fashion, by defining a time slot on a depot. In a more general case with multiple vehicles and wide spread time windows on the orders, there is not a good workaround at the moment.
If none of the workarounds fit your use case but you are still in need of this feature, please reach out to us so we can prioritize bringing this feature to you accordingly.
