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Tobias_Berger
Advisor
Advisor
TM is a transportation management system and as such should also take care about correct timing and duration of loading, travel and unloading activities. In TM the scheduling engine (VSS) is the component which should take care about when activities should happen. There is one more component which can schedule on its own which is the VSR (vehicle scheduling and routing optimizer).

As VSR tries to solve both routing and scheduling issue for some requirement documents at once it needs a lot of information about the freight and the network, the scheduling engine needs much less data and can therefore react much faster.

Therefore, you use the VSR for automatic planning while the scheduler is usually used in manual planning. After changing a document in TM (e.g. with planning a freight unit onto a freight order) times are defaulted by some easy logics and (at this point in time) might not match the requirement document time windows, travel durations or operating times at locations.

Anyways there is one thing the scheduler is not accountable for, which is the travel duration (the duration – not the time when the travel should take place!). The travel duration is directly determined when new stages are created and use the Lane Distance and Duration Determination to persist the information about the duration into the stop successor. So a pre-requisite for a senseful scheduling are travel durations which should either coming from GIS call, from straight line calculation, or from lanes.

There are multiple actions which can trigger Scheduling, the most visible are directly calling the scheduling button, use Gantt chart drag and drop, or using it directly after a manual planning. Less visible are options like calling it in a change strategy, directly during freight unit building, or the so-called forced scheduling.

The following blogs should guide you what’s possible with scheduling.













Scheduling – Manual Planning and Embedded Scheduling


Scheduling – Rule-Based Loading Durations