Incremental Planning is a feature designed to help the customers faced with the challenge of planning additional orders after a days' routes have been scheduled and locked. Imagine a situation: the planning is done, the runs are fixed, and the loading is started. But customers keep calling the transport department asking to accept more orders. It is possible to add new, post-cut-off, orders into a schedule manually but now you can do this automatically. (For more information about all methods of last minute allocation, see Planning last minute orders).
This option is only available on some of tariffs. Please contact the MaxOptra Support Team if you need it.
How Incremental Planning Works in MaxOptra
Before you start incremental planning, make sure your schedule is built and locked, but details are not sent to drivers yet (flashing envelopes on vehicle cards).
To start incremental planning of the locked but not started schedule:
Click the
button. The confirmation window is displayed, proposing to select one of the options:
Reoptimize option – unlocked runs will be re-optimised, locked runs will not be changed;
Incrementally option – unlocked runs will be re-optimised, new orders will be incrementally planned in locked runs without un-allocating or re-allocating the currently allocated orders.
2.Click Incrementally. The system will automatically consider all the order requirements and settings and plan the new orders into the existing schedule (runs are locked, but order details are not sent to drivers yet) if it is feasible, otherwise the orders will remain unplanned.
Note:
New orders are not added to started runs.
During incremental planning, some orders may change their place in the run and be planned earlier or later but cannot be re-allocated to another run or unallocated.
If you click the Incrementally button after order details were sent to the driver, the system will plan new orders to other drivers, who are vacant or have non-started schedules. In case all schedules are started for today, the system will try to build a new run, if multiple runs per day are allowed (see Seetings> Planning preferences > Scheduling); if not - orders will remain in he Unplanned list.
Example of Incremental Planning
Incremental Planning via API
To support the functionality of incremental planning, the new API method to lock and unlock the runs have been added to the Schedules section, called lockUnlock.
Besides, an additional attribute,attribute has been introduced to the start method of Autoscheduling section, called incrementalScheduling.