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Tourplanning+ settings

Settings

Road network

This determines which country or area you are in. All tasks must be within this area.

Colours

Routes are colour-coded, and you choose the scheme:

Weekday: every Monday is the same colour, for everyone. Good for spotting which day you are looking at.
Weekday - two weeks: each day in a fortnight gets its own colour, so this Monday and next Monday differ.
User: each employee has their own colour, whatever the day. Good for following one person.
The colour field on the user: the same, but using the colours set on your employees, so the scheme matches what you use elsewhere.

Split long tasks

Split long tasks allows a job longer than a chosen number of hours to be broken across days. Choose a threshold between four and eight hours, or turn splitting off.

Turn it off if a job has to be done in one visit. Leave it on if long jobs would otherwise be impossible to place, since a nine-hour job in an eight-hour day can never be planned as a single piece.

Start/end

Start at home address and end at last stop: The normal choice. The drive home at the end of the day is not counted as working time. This is what you get if nothing has been set.

Always start and end at home address: Use when the journey home genuinely is part of the working day, or when a van has to be returned.

Start from first task: The day is counted from the first job rather than from leaving home.

Stay until next day if profitable: Allows overnight stays. Only choose this if your people genuinely stay away sometimes. See overnight stay cost below.

Overnight stay cost

For work far enough away that driving home and back the next morning costs more than a hotel, Tourplanning+ can plan an overnight stay. The next day then starts from where the employee stopped rather than from home.

The overnight stay cost only applies under two conditions.

1. Start/end must be set to “Stay until next day if profitable”. With any of the other three options, overnight stays are never planned and the cost setting has no effect at all.

2. The period must cover at least two days. On a single day there is no next morning to save, so the setting is ignored.

Deciding what to put in the field

The number represents what an overnight stay costs you, weighed against the driving it saves. It is not only the hotel bill: an employee who stays away is unavailable in the evening and may need an allowance.

  • Leave it at 0 if overnight stays are free from your point of view, or if you simply want the algorithm to use them whenever they save driving.
  • Set it to roughly what a night away actually costs you if you want a fair trade-off. The algorithm will then only plan one when the driving saved is worth more.
  • Set it high if overnight stays are a last resort. They will only appear when the alternative is much worse.

If you never want them, do not use a high cost. Choose a different Start/end option instead, which removes the possibility entirely.

How to tell it worked

An overnight stay is marked in the route with a divider, text and an icon, so you can see it without hunting. The clearest confirmation is the following morning: the first journey of the next day starts from the previous day's last stop rather than from the employee's home address.

Optimization parameters

There are a bunch of parameters to control that cost of various things, the algorithm will try to find routes that minimize the cost. The exact value of the parameters are not important, but it is easier to understand if you treat them as monetary values.

Cost per hour: Increase this to make the algorithm prefer fewer working hours, even if that means more stops in a day.

Cost per km: Increase this to make the the algorithm prefer shorter routes, i.e. if fuel and driving time matter most.

Overtime cost per minute: The penalty for every minute an employee runs past their scheduled end time.

Overtime penalty cost: A one-off penalty as soon as somebody goes into overtime at all, regardless of by how much.

Overnight stay cost: A penalty when a route runs overnight. See the section above, because this one has conditions.

Planning cost limit: The point at which a stop is no longer worth planning. A stop costing more than this is left unplanned instead of being forced into a route.

Automatic planning

Repeated loose tasks reopen overnight, and Tourplanning+ can replan them before anybody arrives in the morning. Choose which teams this applies to. Tasks belonging to those teams are replanned using the same optimisation you would run by hand.

Only the teams you nominate are affected. An empty list means no automatic replanning happens at all. Nobody reviews the result before it is saved, so it is worth being confident in your cost settings before switching a team on.

Priority group

When there is more work than time, priority groups let you influence what gives way. A priority group is a filter with a price attached: the tasks the filter finds are treated differently by the algorithm.

Each group has four fields:

Title: the name of the group.
Filter: which tasks belong to it.
Cost: how expensive these tasks are considered to be. A higher number makes the algorithm less willing to fit the task into a normal route. High-cost stops are the first to be left unplanned when the day is full.
Priority order: the ranking used when a task matches more than one group. A lower number means higher priority. Order 1 is the most important group. When a task matches two groups, the one with the lower order wins.

To make a group of tasks more likely to be planned, give it a low cost. To make tasks that can wait give way to more urgent work, give them a high cost.

Tooltip

You may setup special tooltips for plannings and users, these tooltips will only be used in the Tourplanning+ module. If you don't setup special tooltips then the standard tooltips will be used.