Modeling shipment windows and business hours

Transportation Optimization honors the pickup and delivery Shipment windows, as well as the Business hours you define for the locations in your model.

The Sites and Customers tables include a Time Zone column that is used to determine the local time for route scheduling. The default time zone is "US Eastern Standard Time". For additional information about time zones, refer to Time zones.

Shipment windows

If you have not defined specific shipment windows, Transportation Optimization uses the following defaults:

• Model horizon start date as the earliest date and time at which a shipment can be picked up from its origin.
• Model horizon end date as the latest date and time at which a shipment can be delivered at its destination.

You can define specific pickup and delivery windows for each shipment:

• Earliest Pickup Date – Define the earliest date and time at which the shipment can be picked up at the origin.
• Latest Pickup Date – Define the latest date and time at which the shipment can be picked up at the origin.
• Order Date – Define the earliest date and time at which the shipment can be delivered at the destination.
• Due Date – Define the latest date and time at which the shipment can be delivered at the destination.

When creating the shipment windows, consider the following:

• Shipments with shipment windows completely outside the model horizon will be invalid. For example, if the start date is 2/1/2016 and your Order Date and Due Date are 1/15/2016 and 1/25/2016 respectively, the shipment is considered invalid. If the start date is 1/20/2016, the same shipment will be considered for routing.

Business hours

You can use business hours to define the times at which locations are open for each day of the week. If you do not define business hours, locations are assumed to be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you limit the business hours, Transportation Optimization does not pick up or deliver shipments outside the business hours.

You can control whether or not business hours must accommodate all service time (loading and unloading). For example, an asset reaches a customer location at 4:50 PM. The customer location closes at 5 PM as defined in the Business Hours table. The unload time is 20 minutes. By default, the service (unloading) must finish before location closes.

In some cases, an asset may arrive at a location prior to its opening and wait until the open time before picking up or delivering shipments. Additionally, if a smaller pickup or delivery window has been defined within the business hours, and an asset arrives prior to that time window, the asset waits until the start time of the window.

You can define business hours directly on the Business Hours table or use the Business Hours Scheduler to create them.

If you edit business hours in an external file using Microsoft Excel, you must include a single quote before each time value, such as:

‘11:45

If the single quote is omitted, Excel incorrectly interprets the value, which affects the value that is imported into the model database.