Planning Optimisation and vehicle fill

[tailsjt]

We are having issues getting good load consolidation (poor vehicle fill) on multi drop routes.
This results in all vehicles being under utilised and consequently the vehicle usage is racked up and we end up with planning failures.

Can anyone suggest some settings we might look at to ensure we get a better vehicle fill.

We have limited vehicles that can operate from the source location and an Equipment group profile covers the types of vehicle that can be used.

[bmj_23]

Re: Planning Optimisation and vehicle fill

Hi, based on my experience, there could be any number of reasons why you are seeing poor vehicle utilisation and getting to the the root cause is sometimes a tricky task.

My advice would be to remove all types of constraints that you currently have in the model. For example, make all pickup and delivery locations open 24 hours a day, remove all earliest and latest pickup and delivery dates and times and if you are modelling DOT constraints, remove those.

Once you have done that, re-run the optimisation and compare the results to what you were getting before. If you are still seeing poor utilisation on an unconstrained model, then manually (in OTM) construct the shipments as you think OTM should do it and see if OTM thinks that is feasible. Chances are, that the bulk plan is doing "the best" it can with the constraints and data it has.

If the results from an unconstrained run are better, then start to add back in the constraints you have removed and in each iteration, re-run the optimisation. This will allow you to identify and understand what constraints are causing "poor vehicle fill".

Inherently within OTM, there is nothing I am aware of that is designed to produce poorly utilised multi stop routes.