Preassigned routes to vehicles
SWAT offers several ways to pre-assign routes to vehicles. Two primary use cases are:
- Vehicle orders are known, but their execution sequence is not.
Example: A regional warehouse pre-assigns daily appliance deliveries to specific trucks based on capacity and geographic clustering. Before departure, routing software optimizes each truck's delivery sequence by considering distances, traffic, and customer time windows. Drivers then follow the optimized routes, minimizing travel time and fuel consumption, while delivery status is tracked to further refine future route planning.
- Vehicle orders and their sequence are known, and the goal is to efficiently integrate new orders as they arrive.
Example: A medical courier service operates with fixed vehicle routes and delivery sequences for scheduled hospital supply runs. When urgent, life-critical supply requests emerge, the system dynamically inserts these priority stops into the existing, predetermined routes, optimizing for minimal disruption to scheduled deliveries while ensuring rapid delivery of the urgent items, and updating the driver's route in real-time.
Implementation
Given known vehicle assignments and orders, the optimization goal is to sequence deliveries to minimize time or distance. SWAT maintains pre-assigned vehicle-order relationships during optimization (order resequencing) that is achieved through using labels