I’m seeking best practice guidance on using service visit prioritization in the Route Optimization API. My scenario is that for a given route optimization, I have specific customer visits for the day that absolutely must be achieved and cannot be unassigned from the route. These service visits don’t necessarily need to happen at the start of the route, they just need to be assigned to the route. How do I ensure specified customer visits are never unassigned from the route and prioritized over less important customer visits (that are ok to be unassigned) for the day? I understand that the Service parameter has the concept of Priority (1=Highest and 10=Lowest). However, on another thread in this forum, it was indicated that Priority level is not necessarily an absolute (is a suggested priority, not an absolute), which would not meet my need here. I also see in a forum post it’s suggested to use the Services Priority parameter in conjunction with the Services Group parameter to ensure high priority visits are never unassigned.
Can someone please give guidance and a working example of which exact parameters I should use to achieve my goal here? Is it indeed a combination of Service ‘Priority’ + ‘Group’ and will that ensure specified visit locations are never unassigned? Or is there a better approach?