Characteristic
Short description
Optimization Premium is a specially licensed option in PlanTourRequest for boosting the quality of the solution.
Use
Use Optimization Premium for higher quality results while planning tours.
Detailed Consideration
Quality Improvements
Optimization Premium uses diverse exclusive neighborhoods that are only enabled within this mode. These diverse neighborhoods allow the algorithm to explore a larger search space and accordingly find better solutions. Furthermore, this mode allows for more parallelization to search in distinct search spaces.
The bigger the instances are, the more improvement can be gained by using Optimization Premium. Although every use case is unique and improvements cannot be guaranteed, customers with Premium Optimization can expect up to 30% fewer unplanned orders, and/or up to 30% smaller fleet size. In cases where all orders are already planned, Optimization Premium delivers up to 10% cost savings.
In the case of using restriction like order groups' preferences one trip per group and one group per trip, or single stop per customer site quality may not improve as much as in the other cases.
Resource configuration and consumption
As mentioned in the last segment, Optimization Premium utilizes parallelization for obtaining a better solution. The consequence is that the hosting server of XServer must ideally have enough capacity and allow allocation of this capacity to the xTour module via the associated configuration. If not enough resources exist or xTour access to resources is restricted, planning with Optimization Premium can lead to higher running times. In the case of the single thread allocation for example, the running time can be up to 5 times higher. When enough resources are available, on average a 30% increase in the running time is to be expected.
We recommend having a minimum of 4 CPU cores available on the server for every xTour module and setting the maximum number of threads to be used by the xTour service to 4. Set this value with parameter xtour.maxNumberOfThreads in xserver.conf. For more information about xserver.conf visit Administrator's Guide Server Configuration and Services Configuration.
Depending on the availability of resources, Optimization Premium can increase CPU consumption by factor of 4. The impact on memory remains minimal.
Licensing
Optimization Premium requires a special license that can be obtained by contacting your PTV representative.
Good to know
Only applicable with a product license
Optimization Premium is only available for PTV customers with a product license.
Related Topics
| Administrator's Guide | Server Configuration |