Feature Requests

This is a request to add a way to express a preference (not just a hard constraint) for performing a visit within a certain time window. This would allow the optimizer to favor, but not strictly enforce, visits occurring at preferred times, helping balance schedule flexibility with patient or staff preferences.

Express a preference for a visit to be scheduled at a certain time (range), but not make it a hard requirement.

This is a request to be able to account for depot stock levels of non-renewable materials when optimizing field service routes. In some scenarios, visits require specific consumable materials or parts (for example, wood from a depot). The model should consider the availability of these non-renewable resources when assigning visits to technicians and depots, ensuring that planned visits are feasible given current stock levels. This would help prevent infeasible plans and improve coordination between inventory management and route optimization.

This is a request to add a soft-constraint version of the current requiredArea rule. Today, required areas are enforced strictly, but some planning scenarios would benefit from treating them as preferences (for example, preferring that visits stay within a nurse’s area but still allowing exceptions when needed).

This is a request to enhance preferredVehicles by allowing weighted preferences or affinities. Instead of treating all preferences equally, users could assign higher or lower preference levels to vehicles or employees, letting the solver choose more accurately based on ranked suitability or historical patterns.

This is a request to introduce a way to express preferences for assigning certain visits to specific vehicles or employees. Similar to the existing preferredVehicles setting at the visit level, this would let planners favor assigning particular visits to nurses or drivers who prefer or are best suited for them, while still allowing flexibility if needed.

This is a request to extend the existing dependency rules by allowing a maximum delay ( maxDelayTo ) between visits, in addition to the current minimum delay ( minDelayTo ). This would make it possible to define flexible but time-bounded visit patterns, such as “three visits per week with at least one day and at most two days between them,” or “two visits on the same day with no more than four hours in between.”

This is a request to be able to mark certain visits or groups of visits as mutually exclusive. When one of the visits in the group is assigned, the others should not be. This allows modeling flexible visit locations (for example, when a patient can be visited either at home or at another location on certain days) without double booking or conflicting assignments.

Investigate whether we can expand travelTimeAdjustment with geocode information to configure the adjustment for a certain (e.g. London) area instead of over all.

Can we expand the functionality of the recommendation endpoint to allow more than one visit to be taken as input? To be discussed how the suggestions for the groups of visit (not visit group!) would interact.