(Modified vehicle routing Delivering petroleum products to fuel stations) - Dynamic number of planning variable

[Narayana Khadri]

Hi all,

I am looking forward to your suggestions, read all the available material but no answer.

Problem: Truck assignment with limited quantity to deliver to the customer (Delivering petroleum products to fuel stations).

The truck has to be assigned to the customer. As the truck has limited quantity, the truck needs to return back to reload again to deliver to the next customer.

Trip - load at Depot, unload at customer/few customers, come back to depot.

So the fact is available trucks and customers. We need to find dynamically how many trips can be possible from truck based on few timing-related conditions(like truck available time, driver hours etc).

The solution I can think off:

Pre-compute max number of trips by the truck - use this a planning variable. Provide hard constraint for violating time constraints, so few trips will be left free if it exceeds the available truck/trip time.

Need Help:

For every problem in examples, we have a fixed number of planning entity before planning.  Even In the chained planning variable, we have the fixed number of trucks beforehand. 

Any help is appreciated. If there is no direct solution, is the approach I have come up is the best possible?

Thanks,

Narayan

[Narayana Khadri]

Hi all,

Added as a question in stack overflow as well so it can help wider audience - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69529819/optaplanner-dynamic-number-of-planning-variable-based-on-problemfactcollectionp

Thanks for the help.

[Narayana Khadri]

Thanks, Geoffrey for the answer to this question in StackOverflow 

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69529819/optaplanner-dynamic-number-of-planning-variable-based-on-problemfactcollectionp

[Geoffrey De Smet]

You're welcome :)

With kind regards,
Geoffrey De Smet