WKS: Sub-daily Planning-Horizons
The planning profile learned a new trick: Based on the feedback of a customer at the customer network meeting we added a small but sometimes important function to the planning profile.
You can now easily define sub-day planning horizons, e.g. a separate one for the morning and afternoon tour. This can become very relevant e.g. when many resources are involved, as in this case not only the optimizer knows better the real otpions, but also the context determination and with that the performance is fine-tuned. As a nice side-effect of the development tehre is now also a nice popup window showing the result of the current planning profile setting.
All features are collected on the screenshot: The new option in the Absolute/Relative time horizon section and the simulation button and popup:
Example: You want a planning horizon 2pm to midnight for the next day, and the job runs at 8pm.
Then you can choose the following setting:
Duration in days: 0 (as the planning horizon is shorter than a day)
Additional Duration: 8:00h (the actual duration)
Offset direction: Future
Offset in days: 1
Fixed Start time: 14:00 (2pm)
If you do the same for the same day, just leave the offset in days blank.
This is available for TM 9.5 and TM 9.4, note 2557563 introduces the basics and the notes 2586192 and 2581340 are there for some fine-tuning.
This planning horizon setting worked really well for this e-commerce home delivery scenario. Planning runs was running right after midnight for today’s home delivery requirements. Two planning runs was required, starting at 00:10 and 01:15. Called AM- and PM planning run.
Selection and Planning profile for AM selected delivery requirements from 06:00-12:00 and PM selected delivery requirements from 12:00-22:00. Planning 550-800 FU’s with different address locations more or less every day. All are home delivery scenarios and having 40 resources available(resource return to depot for reuse) there was a need to reduce planning time, transport network complexity and ability to control the control the planning horizon with a fixed start time, not absolute horizon within a calendar day.
All planning in this scenario run in the background as well as Delivery creation proposal to ECC and Transportation Unit creation from each FO, distributed to EWM for execution respecting leave yard time and loading sequence issued by TM.
If you require multiple planning runs e.g for next workday for transport demands like 06-15 hours and 15-22 hours, and especially if planning is running in background this new setting is useful.
Regards,
Tom Rune Bjornstad