How to plan multiple trips with HERE Tour Planning

The HERE Tour Planning API now supports reloading of the delivery vehicle multiple times in the same shift. The multi-reload feature helps businesses that have limited vehicles in the fleet, to create optimized delivery routes which includes pickup or reload of items from the same depot or different location. In this blog post, we will discuss the new multi-reload feature, who can benefit from it, and how to use it.

HERE Tour Planning creates a cost and time optimized sequence of all the deliveries and pickups, considering factors such as number of vehicles in fleet, capacity of each vehicle, delivery time windows, multiple warehouses, pickups and deliveries, driver shifts, truck attributes and more. The API can be integrated with an existing Transport Management System. This is particularly useful for businesses that rely on transportation and delivery, such as e-commerce companies, postal and courier services, and food delivery services. If you are new to it, head over to our previous blog post to get started with Tour Planning.

Multi-reload technique is used in fleet management to optimize delivery routes by reducing the number of vehicles required, because the same vehicle can make multiple trips in the same shift and deliver more items. It is specially useful when there is limited capacity in the vehicle. This is common in crowded areas where smaller vehicles need to be used, and vehicles need to make multiple trips.

First, let's look at the syntax. The reload option is added to "fleet" part of the Tour Planning request. This is added as "shifts", by specifying the location of reload and its duration.

        {
  "plan": {
    "jobs": [
       // . . . pickup and delivery details go here
    ]
  },
  "fleet": {
    "types": [
      {
        "profile": "vehicle",
        "amount": 1,
        "capacity": [3],
        "costs": {
          "distance": 0.004,
          "time": 0.0024,
          "fixed": 22
        },
        "id": "vehicle_1",
        "shifts": [
          {
            "start": {
              "location": { "lat": 12.96844, "lng": 77.5962 },
              "time": "2023-03-07T08:00:00-08:00"
            },
            "end": {
              "location": { "lat": 12.96844, "lng": 77.5962 },
              "time": "2023-03-07T18:00:00-08:00"
            },
            "reloads": [
              {
                "location": { "lat": 12.96844, "lng": 77.5962 },
                "duration": 60
              }
            ]
          }
        ]
      }
    ],
    "profiles": [{ "name": "vehicle", "type": "scooter" }]
  }
}

  

Next, to see this in action, consider you are a small food delivery service company based in Bengaluru, India with one scooter in your fleet. Your task is to pick food packages from restaurants and deliver them to different location. Capacity of your scooter is 3 units. Without multi-reload, when your company receives more than 3 order deliveries, you are looking at making few separate trips to these addresses, resulting in increased travel time, fuel consumption and labor costs. By adding the multi-reload parameter, this trip is considered as a single shift, which includes reloading of items on the delivery vehicle at appropriate times. In this example, we are looking at processing 5 deliveries from a Cafe (depicted as a pin below) and dropping these to 5 customers, using a scooter that can accommodate 3 orders at a time. 

Passing this request to the Tour Planning API, we get a sequence of stops from our Cafe that delivers at 3 locations, come back to the Cafe for a reload, and continues to rest of the deliveries. 

This is a simple example showing the usage, but this can be scaled to fit your use cases, whether you need to reload multiple times, or from same depot or different, or at specified times. The multi-reload feature allows logistics companies to do more with less vehicles in their fleet! Check out the tutorial for some detailed examples and code for multi-reload in Tour Planning.