These settings control what the algorithm does. When a plan looks wrong, the settings are usually the reason and the fix.
You will find them under Tourplanning → Configuration.
How the algorithm thinks about cost
The optimiser does not look for the shortest route. It looks for the cheapest one, and you decide what things cost. An hour of working time has a price, a kilometre driven has a price, and running into overtime has a price. The algorithm finds the arrangement with the lowest total.
What matters is the ratio between the numbers, not their absolute size. Doubling every cost changes nothing. Doubling only the cost per kilometre tells the algorithm that driving now matters twice as much, and it will start trading working hours for shorter distances.
The vehicle costs
|
Setting |
Starts at |
What raising it does |
|---|---|---|
|
Cost per hour |
150 |
The algorithm prefers fewer working hours, even if that means more stops in a day. |
|
Cost per km |
20 |
The algorithm prefers shorter routes. Raise this if fuel and driving time matter most. |
|
Overtime cost per minute |
200 |
The penalty for every minute an employee runs past their scheduled end time. |
|
Overtime penalty cost |
0 |
A one-off penalty as soon as somebody goes into overtime at all, regardless of by how much. |
|
Overnight stay cost |
0 |
A penalty when a route runs overnight. See the section below, because this one has conditions. |
|
Planning cost limit |
5000 |
The point at which a stop is no longer worth planning. A stop costing more than this is left unplanned instead of being forced into a route. |
The planning cost limit is the setting most likely to surprise you. If the auto-plan keeps leaving stops unplanned even though there appears to be time for them, this limit is usually why.
How to tune them
Changing several at once tells you nothing, because you cannot see which change did what. Work like this instead:
-
Pick one real week that you know well, and optimise it without changing anything. Write down the total distance and total hours.
-
Change one setting. Optimise the same week again. Write the two numbers down again.
-
Compare. If the number you cared about did not move, the change was too small. Double it rather than nudging it.
Two worked examples:
“We are spending too much on driving”
Raise cost per km and leave everything else alone. Try doubling it to start with.
Expect total distance to fall. Expect total hours to rise slightly, because the algorithm is now willing to spend a little more time in order to drive less. If hours rise more than you can accept, raise cost per hour a little as well until the balance is right.
“Overtime must not happen”
Raise the overtime penalty cost, the one-off one, rather than the per-minute cost.
The per-minute cost makes long overtime expensive but leaves ten minutes cheap. The one-off penalty makes any overtime expensive, which is what you want when the rule is simply that people go home on time.
Very large values are capped, so there is no point entering something enormous to force a result. If a setting stops making a difference, it has reached its ceiling and the answer lies in a different setting.
Stops and driving
-
Additional drive time adds a fixed number of minutes to every drive between two stops. Set it to a few minutes as a buffer for traffic and the walk from the car. This is the quickest fix if plans look right on paper but run late in reality.
-
Sort stops at same location decides the order of stops sharing an address, by choosing a field on the task to sort them by. Useful where several jobs at one site have a natural sequence.
-
Max sort bundle duration caps how much work is grouped together this way, so a single location cannot swallow a whole day.
Where a working day starts and ends
These two settings shape every route more than anything else, so it is worth being deliberate about them.
Start location
Where an employee is considered to be at the beginning of the day. This decides which jobs the algorithm thinks are convenient for whom.
-
Home address: the day starts from where the employee lives. Use this when people drive straight from home to the first job.
-
Work address: the day starts from the workplace. Use this when people come in first, to collect a van, materials or paperwork.
-
Where they left off yesterday: the day starts wherever the previous day finished. Use this for work that runs across several days away from home.
Start/end
What happens at the end of a day.
|
Option |
When to choose it |
|---|---|
|
Start at home address and end at last stop |
The normal choice. The drive home at the end of the day is not counted as working time. This is what you get if nothing has been set. |
|
Always start and end at home address |
Use when the journey home genuinely is part of the working day, or when a van has to be returned. |
|
Start from first task |
The day is counted from the first job rather than from leaving home. |
|
Stay until next day if profitable |
Allows overnight stays. Only choose this if your people genuinely stay away sometimes. See below. |
Overnight stays
For work far enough away that driving home and back the next morning costs more than a hotel, Tourplanning+ can plan an overnight stay. The next day then starts from where the employee stopped rather than from home.
The overnight stay cost only applies under two conditions.
1. Start/end must be set to “Stay until next day if profitable”. With any of the other three options, overnight stays are never planned and the cost setting has no effect at all.
2. The period must cover at least two days. On a single day there is no next morning to save, so the setting is ignored.
Deciding what to put in the field
The number represents what an overnight stay costs you, weighed against the driving it saves. It is not only the hotel bill: an employee who stays away is unavailable in the evening and may need an allowance.
-
Leave it at 0 if overnight stays are free from your point of view, or if you simply want the algorithm to use them whenever they save driving.
-
Set it to roughly what a night away actually costs you if you want a fair trade-off. The algorithm will then only plan one when the driving saved is worth more.
-
Set it high if overnight stays are a last resort. They will only appear when the alternative is much worse.
If you never want them, do not use a high cost. Choose a different Start/end option instead, which removes the possibility entirely.
How to tell it worked
An overnight stay is marked in the route with a divider, text and an icon, so you can see it without hunting. The clearest confirmation is the following morning: the first journey of the next day starts from the previous day's last stop rather than from the employee's home address.
Colours
Routes are colour-coded, and you choose the scheme:
-
Weekday: every Monday is the same colour, for everyone. Good for spotting which day you are looking at.
-
Weekday over two weeks: each day in a fortnight gets its own colour, so this Monday and next Monday differ.
-
User: each employee has their own colour, whatever the day. Good for following one person.
-
The colour field on the user: the same, but using the colours set on your employees, so the scheme matches what you use elsewhere.
Splitting long jobs
Split long tasks allows a job longer than a chosen number of hours to be broken across days. Choose a threshold between four and eight hours, or turn splitting off.
Turn it off if a job has to be done in one visit. Leave it on if long jobs would otherwise be impossible to place, since a nine-hour job in an eight-hour day can never be planned as a single piece.
Automatic planning
Repeated loose tasks reopen overnight, and Tourplanning+ can replan them before anybody arrives in the morning. Choose which teams this applies to. Tasks belonging to those teams are replanned using the same optimisation you would run by hand.
Only the teams you nominate are affected. An empty list means no automatic replanning happens at all. Nobody reviews the result before it is saved, so it is worth being confident in your cost settings before switching a team on.
Tooltips
You can set up your own tooltips for plannings and for users, and they apply only inside Tourplanning+. Without them, the standard Microbizz tooltips are used.
Priority groups
When there is more work than time, priority groups let you influence what gives way. A priority group is a filter with a price attached: the tasks the filter finds are treated differently by the algorithm.
Each group has four fields:
-
Title: what the group is.
-
Filter: which tasks belong to it.
-
Cost: how expensive these tasks are considered to be.
-
Priority order: the ranking used when a task matches more than one group.
The two numbers work in opposite directions.
Priority order: a lower number means higher priority. Order 1 is the most important group. When a task matches two groups, the one with the lower order wins.
Cost: a higher number makes the algorithm less willing to fit the task into a normal route. High-cost stops are the first to be left unplanned when the day is full.
To make a group of tasks more likely to be planned, give it a low cost. To make tasks that can wait give way to more urgent work, give them a high cost.
Priority groups are maintained under Tourplanning → Configuration → Priority group. Saving a group applies it immediately to every task its filter matches.
Server settings
The optimisation runs on a separate server, and its address and credentials are configured here. These are set up by Microbizz and should not be changed. If optimisation stops working entirely rather than producing poor results, ask us about this.