To understand how it works, let us consider the following user case. Perhaps, a driver has some orders for 24/05/2018 (Edinburgh) and 25/05/2018 (London) without coming back to the depot located in Chippenham. So, the vehicle would leave Chippenham and go to Edinburgh to perform some drops on 24/05/2018, stay overnight and then start driving from Edinburg to London on 25/05/2018 before heading back to the depot (Chippenham). How to set it correctly? Apparently, it brings the driver back to the depot, and not recognize the vehicle would stay out overnight.

This case can be resolved if you use multiple time windows with tight or strict access time. But this scheduling case may require you to increase the duty time/driving time of a driver up to 48 hours instead of 12 hours or remove totally any time restriction.

For example, we have an order to deliver from Chippenham to Edinburgh. First, we have to set multiple time Operation time windows from 08:00am to 06:00pm for two days for this order:

Then we do the same with the Edinburgh-London order:

The second step you have to perform is to specify the Availability hours of this driver and enable the Start driving exactly from the shift start checkbox.

Now, run auto-planning for 24/05/2018 and you will find these orders automatically allocated to a driver who resolves the conditions of overnight:

Note It is possible to set up multi-day shifts up to 5 days long in MaxOptra. You just need to specify the shift duration in the Driver form.

When planning a multi-day run, to avoid overlapping plans, the dispatcher has to deactivate the vehicle the orders are allocated to for the next dates, since it will be occupied. In our case, to deactivate a vehicle, select the next date on the calendar (25.05.2018), right-click the vehicle card on the Planning screen and select the Deactivate vehicle option from the Vehicle actions menu:

The vehicle will not participate in scheduling for the next date (25.05.2018).This action will be applied to the vehicle for the current selected date only (25.05.2018). Therefore, the dispatcher has to deactivate the vehicle for the next planning dates separately.

If you have any externally built schedule with a multi-day run having orders allocated to a particular vehicle and driver, you may import orders with their allocation to vehicles, runs and sequences in runs in order to reconstruct this schedule in MaxOptra.

To import schedule with a multi-day run from a CSV-file to MaxOptra, use the Standard Import File for Multi-day & Overnight. In the import file, fill in the fields "orderDateFrom", "orderDateTo", "orderTimeFrom", "orderTimeTo" for orders with multiple operation time windows. To the Standard Import File for Multi-day & Overnight, add the "allocationDate", "vehicleName", "runNumber" and "sequenceInRun" fields and fill them in with the values:

If your want your externally built schedule with a multi-day run to be planned in MaxOptra, you will need to set the Availability hours for the drivers specified in your import file to have multi-day runs.