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CRM-Salesforce

Salesforce Developers

Sources and Destinations

What if we want to find the distance and travel times between locations when we know where we're starting and going? In this case, we'd make use of the sources and destinations parameters.

Let’s consider an exaggerated real-world example to clarify the use of sources and destinations . Suppose we have the current locations for a fleet of three (3) vehicles and the locations of three (3) available fueling stations. The sources (where we are coming from) and destinations (where we are going to) parameters limit the size of the returned matrix to only the desired results. This makes post-processing by your code simpler because you can apply filters (a parallelized operation) to what are sometimes large, complex matrices.

To frame the problem, below is our fleet and fueling locations:

Fleet Fueling Locations
vehicle-1 fueling-1
vehicle-2 fueling-2
vehicle-3 fueling-3

Let's imagine this problem as a distance matrix. Obviously, we're only interested in the distances from vehicles to fueling locations, and not interested in the distances for:

  • A vehicle or fueling location to itself — where would it get fuel?
  • Vehicles to other vehicles — other vehicles don't have fuel to share
  • Fueling locations to other fueling locations — other stations don't have fuel to share
  • Fueling locations to vehicles — the station cannot go to the vehicle (although that would be cool)

In the distance matrix template below, we've added a helpful zero-based "index" as a visual guide which is not part of the actual distance matrix inputs. Note that as a result of using an index-based approach, ORDER MATTERS . This is not an ideal design and is being updated in the next major revision of the API.

index 0 1 2 3 4 5
destinations vehicle-1 vehicle-2 vehicle-3 fueling-1 fueling-2 fueling-3
sources
0 vehicle-1 -- -- -- YES YES YES
1 vehicle-2 -- -- -- YES YES YES
2 vehicle-3 -- -- -- YES YES YES
3 fueling-1 -- -- -- -- -- --
4 fueling-2 -- -- -- -- -- --
5 fueling-3 -- -- -- -- -- --

In order to limit our distance matrix request so that it mirrors our template above and only returns relevant distances, we specify the sources and destinations parameters using the index of each entry. For this example then, our sources and destinations parameters will look like this in the request:

The complete request we will send to the Distance Matrix endpoint is given below.

Expand to view request sample

The complete response we receive from the Distance Matrix endpoint is given below. As expected, we only have travel_costs which show going from sources to destinations:

  • vehicle-1 to fueling-1/2/3
  • vehicle-2 to fueling-1/2/3
  • vehicle-3 to fueling-1/2/3
Expand to view response sample

Salesforce Developers

Traffic Windows

Traffic windows refer to the time segments that have an effect on traffic costs. Obviously, heavy traffic will result in higher overall traffic costs.

The Optimization API returns all traffic windows by default. However, you can limit the size of the response by setting start and end times. With start and end times, the Optimization API will only return traffic windows which “touch” the start and end times. This example illustrates that use case.

Suppose you’re only interested in two-time windows that correspond to the morning commute. In this example, we set the start_local_time parameter to 9:00 am and the end_local_time parameter to 12:00.

In the response, the Optimization API has found two traffic windows (indexed 0 and 1) that intersect with these times. It uses this data to reduce the size of the matrix. You can review a sample traffic window below. Note that a single window consists of an index, a start time, and an end time. These windows are referenced by the travel cost object.

Note that the travel cost object refers to the actual matrix that the Optimization API calculates. It consists of the travel distance in meters and the travel cost for each window. The sample JSON provides comments to explain the output.

Expand to view request sample
Expand to view response sample
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Salesforce Developers

Weekday Traffic

This request payload uses the same four locations as the Basic Distance Matrix example but sets the weekend parameter to false .

Expand to view request sample
Expand to view response sample
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Salesforce Developers

Routing Optimization

The Routing Optimization service is powered by an optimization engine designed to handle a huge variety of problems and aims to help you find your optimal business solution by giving you control over how your problem is solved. Your creativity only limits the variety of problems!

Basics

Routing optimization is a more complex version of point-to-point routing where the goal is instead to solve one of the most mathematically complicated problems known to humanity. Building the routes seen above is the outcome of submitting a simple (minimize distance) routing problem to our Routing Optimization service. So, how does one construct a routing problem? There are a few key ingredients one needs first:

  • VEHICLES — the cars, trucks, bikes, or pedestrians that comprise your fleet.
  • LOCATIONS — the physical places your vehicles are routed to provide service.
  • ORDERS — the requests for your services at a specific location over some time.
  • ITEMS — the units of work ordered at a location, e.g., a package delivery, one LTL pickup, four hours of service.
  • CONSTRAINTS — the knobs that tune the solution objective, e.g., maximize revenue, minimize vehicles.

Minimizing the total number of vehicles and total travel time are often a primary goal in most, if not all, routing optimization problems. However, there are other business objectives and tradeoffs to consider. For example, a salesperson might visit five more high-value leads in a day, but at the cost of reduced visits with high-priority customers. Instead of hiding tradeoffs from you, the Routing Optimization service gives you control via constraints that provide the ultimate — sometimes daunting — flexibility and power in solving your problem.

Constraints

Imagine the case where you want a routing solution that penalizes lateness to scheduled appointments. However, maybe you have the luxury of being an excellent customer service company and can be "a little late" without fear of damaging a customer relationship. In which case, it is acceptable to visit a big account lead before an appointment even if that means being late. In which case, you are looking for a solution like:

"Find the optimal routes for my sales team where they have penalized 25 penalty points for every 15 minutes they are late to a scheduled appointment."

Constraint Penalties

Behind the scenes, this is what our patented mathematical optimization algorithms do when they seek out the best solution based on the constraints you provide. Where the "best" solution is the one that captures most, and sometimes all, of your desired business logic and outcomes.

Constraints are given control over the routing solution by accruing penalty points every time the solution violates a constraint in some way. The concept is that the solution with the lowest number of penalty points is the best solution. Using constraints in this way results in having to tune your solutions, and is a bit of an art for your developers. However, once they get the hang of it, the options are limitless.

Visit the Constraint Library and the associated examples for each to see the full details.

For real-world business needs, the Routing Optimization service takes the approach of running a sophisticated optimization algorithm for a reasonable amount of time before returning a solution. To achieve this, we divide problems into synchronous and asynchronous jobs depending on the size and difficulty of the problem (request formats for asynchronous and synchronous calls are the same):

  • Synchronous jobs are for smaller requests (less than 50 locations) and are processed immediately.
  • Asynchronous jobs are for larger requests (more than 50 locations), and a jobid is returned once a request is received and validated. The user can then poll the API for job status and retrieve the results when the job completes. Once it completes, the responses are purged after 24 hours.
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Salesforce Developers

Breaks

The optimization engine offers a wide variety of methods to express breaks in a route – these are periods during a shift which the vehicle/driver is not servicing any orders. The breaks are properties of the shift so that in problems where a vehicle has multiple shifts, different breaks can exist for the same vehicle across the different shifts. There are three types of breaks supported

  • BREAK — A period of time during which the vehicle is not moving and no orders are serviced. This type of break is useful to express events such as a lunch break at a known time. For the standard break, the start and end time are explicitly expressed, and the break is always honored. A shift can have multiple breaks but the breaks cannot overlap (since two overlapping breaks really just represent a single longer break).
  • SOFT BREAK — A period of time during which no orders are serviced, but the vehicle may or may not be moving. This type of break is useful to express events such as a pre-scheduled phone call that might take place while the vehicle is moving. For the soft break, the start and end time are explicitly expressed, and the soft break is always honored. A shift can have multiple soft breaks but the soft breaks cannot overlap (since two overlapping soft breaks really just represent a single longer soft break). A shift can have a mixture of breaks and soft breaks, but they cannot overlap.
  • FLOATING BREAK — The floating break has a fixed duration but can start at any time during a provided window. The vehicle is not allowed to be moving during a floating break. The floating break can be used to handle compliance requirements where a driver must receive a certain amount of rest during any continuous work period of a certain length. As with the other breaks, any route for the shift will always honor the floating break. Floating breaks can be used in conjunction with the other break types.

In the following three examples, we have a single vehicle with 6 total orders in the Washington, DC/Baltimore area. In each case, we have a different kind of 45-minute break that impacts the efficiency of the shift.

Hard Break

In this first example, we have a hard break from 12:30 to 1:15. As the vehicle cannot be traveling during this period, it turns out that it is not possible to visit all 6 orders in this case and the Baltimore order is not visited. The route ends at 3:22, and there are more than 2 hours of time remaining in the shift. However, that does not provide sufficient time to complete a round trip to Baltimore to service the final order.

Expand to view request sample

img

With a hard break of 45 minutes starting at 12:30, it is not possible to visit all 6 orders.

Soft Break

In a soft break, recall that the vehicle is allowed to be moving during the break. This additional level of flexibility allows us to now visit all 6 orders as the soft break is taken after servicing the Baltimore order and returning to DC. The route concludes with about 40 minutes to spare before the end of the shift.

Expand to view request sample

img

The soft break is taken on the way back down to DC after the Baltimore order (stop 3 in the route).

Floating Break

The floating break allows us an additional degree of flexibility as we are now allowed to take the 45-minute break at any time during the day. Even though the break is similar to a hard break in that the vehicle cannot be moving, the freedom to scheduled this break any time during the shift allows sufficient freedom that we are now able to visit all 6 orders. The floating break occurs immediately after the final order at the Vietnam Memorial, and we complete the route with less than 2 minutes to spare in the shift.

Expand to view request sample

img

The floating break allows us to visit all 6 orders even though the vehicle does not move during the break. Note that we traverse the orders in a slightly different sequence than with the soft break. With the optimization engine’s ability to incorporate predicted traffic into the route optimization, the floating break can be a powerful way to add some additional flexibility into the route.

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Salesforce Developers

Delivery Only Problem with Replenishment and Balanced Routes

In this example, we have a fictitious company that delivers various sizes of pallets to customer locations. The fleet is not large enough to carry all the pallets for the day in a single load, so the vehicles can return to various locations throughout the day to replenish their supply of pallets. The three types of pallets to be delivered are described in the items array below

The vehicles are constrained in terms of how much of each item they can carry as well as by volume and weight. Each vehicle’s capacity is expressed separately as part of the vehicle object, and an example vehicle object now looks like this. Note that we are specifying the "type": "truck" so that the paths over the street network between stops are compliant with the dimensions of the truck.

As in other delivery problems, we express the amount to be delivered to each order with delivery_item_quantities . In problems involving deliveries, the vehicle may become empty during the shift and be therefore unable to service any more orders. By specifying certain orders to have the ability to replenish the supply, we can extend the shift since the vehicle can refill an amount so that more orders can be serviced. An example of such a replenishment order is below. Note that the amount that can be replenished must be set – typically this should be a very large value if essentially limitless replenishment can occur at this stop. If the replenishment stop has a limited supply of items, then that can be specified as well, and the total amount of supply added to the vehicles at this stop will not exceed the amount specified. Additionally, a duration is specified for the replenishment, and a maximum number of visits (enforced by the visit_range constraint)

A full request involving deliveries, replenishment events, and a num_stops constraint to balance the routes is given below.

Expand to view request sample

img

All replenishments occur at the central depot (boxed in red). In the purple route, the vehicle visits stop 1 and stop 2, replenishes in stop 3, then services stops 4, 5, and 6 in the western portion and returns to replenish in stop 7. The route concludes by servicing stops 8 and 9 south of the depot before returning home. The output JSON contains the full details of the stops and specifies when the replenishments occur.

In the routes returned in the API response, any stop where items are delivered will have details of what is delivered, and how much of each item is in the vehicle at that time. An example is below:

For every replenishment stop, an items_replenished array is included to describe the activity at the stop.

As with unloading problems, other features of the pickup/delivery aspects of the route are also included in the route object, such as max_volume_in_vehicle , max_num_items_in_vehicle , and max_weight_in_vehicle . Since vehicle capacity constraints are never violated, the optimization engine ensures that no vehicle will ever be carrying more than its capacity at any point during the route (in terms of weight/volume/number of items). The replenishment stops are strategically inserted by the algorithm in order to satisfy as many orders as possible while still respecting the vehicle capacities.

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