Delivery Only Problem

In this example, we have a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles that deliver two item types, box (volume of 1 unit) and big_box (volume of 2 units) as seen in the items array below

The vehicles are constrained both in terms of how much of each item they can carry as well as by maximum volume carried. Each vehicle’s capacity is expressed separately allowing for a truly heterogeneous fleet. Our vehicle object now looks like this

The orders also have a demand for some number of items of these types – this is expressed in their delivery_item_quantities as seen in the full request below. Note that there are no pickup_item_quantities at any of the orders so that this is a pure delivery problem where the optimization engine will determine how much of each item type each vehicle must start the route with.

In this case we use all 4 vehicles but are unable to visit 4 of the orders due to the capacity constraints on the vehicles. Below, we see the impact of doubling each vehicle’s capacity – we are now able to visit all the orders and actually only need 3 of the 4 vehicles to do so.

The impact of doubling vehicle capacity. In the API response, the items_delivered at each stop is given in an array

The optimization engine also determines how many items the vehicle must have on board when the shift begins. This is recorded in the start_items object of the route. By loading the vehicle with these items at the start of the route, all orders in the route will have their delivery demand satisfied.

Other features of the delivery aspect of the route are also included in the route object, such as max_volume_in_vehicle, max_num_items_in_vehicle.