Calculation of service times enlarged for Route Optimization / New API version 1.8.0

New Feature:

Service times may have a great impact on the time scheduling of a trip. Especially in urban planning problems, when driving time between customers is only a small time span, the importance of service time may increase.
With the new version of the PTV Developer Route Optimization API PTV offers more flexibility in modelling service times.

As already introduced in Sequence Optimization the new functionality is about to consider location-dependent service times, which are independent from the quantity of goods.  The location-dependent service time represents, for example, the time to enter the premises or to register at a customer. This can be set via 

  • serviceTimePerTransportStop for customers
  • serviceTimePerPickupStop resp. serviceTimePerDeliveryStop for depots

Moreover, in Route Optimization it may be important to distinguish vehicles of a fleet in terms of service times by the following attributes:

  • With serviceTimePerTransportStop on vehicle level you can define absolut Vehicle-dependent service time for example for maneuvering. This service time is taken into account for each stop served by this vehicle to pick up or deliver goods.
  •  The serviceTimeFactor on vehicle level scales transport-dependent service times of all transport-related service actions, for example, if loading and unloading with this vehicle is more or less complicate than normal.
  • If for a location this service time factor doesn’t apply e.g. due to special equipment at this site, this service time can be ignored via applyVehicleDependentServiceTimeFactor = False on location level.

See also the concept page for service times, which describes the functionality more in detail.

Improvement:

Formerly the plan results could have been influenced by the choice of location or transport IDs. 
Now the plan results stay the same whatever IDs you choose.

 

You can check the new features in the list below or use the API Changes webpage for more details.

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