I am trying to do route optimzation calculation with a number of service points. I do need the tour to start at one of the service points and not at a specified depot. (Our customer expects some of his employees to start their work at the first service point, not at their home location)
So far it seems that I need to specify a start_address in the vehicle section. Is it possible to somehow leave this out, so that the tour starts at whichever service point happens to be first?
If I’m not wrong (please @stefan correct me here), we currently do not optimize the start location (nor time) and so we require this as input. Not sure if this workaround works: you can try to create multiple vehicles with all the different start points and it would pick the best, but this will be a credit-intense operation.
Hey Karussel,
do you plan to integrate such a feature? We would highly appreciate that!
It is on our growing road map. But it is not that simple.
Oh jeah, I know. We tried to build smthng like that by our own.
We ended up with a acceptable solution with just using the direct distances between the points (not the real road-based distances). But, you know, it’s far from perfect.
Also we use another hacky workaround:
We take the maximal outbounds of the geopoints and also the middle point. After that we place the vehicles around that borders and one or more in the middle. The more vehicles you use, the better is the result.
The Algorithm works after that very well, but it consumes a lot of points unfortunately, which drives us nuts.
Here’s an example: the red squares are vehicles, the blue circles are pick-up-points:
