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I have created a vehicle routing problem for a small 6 x 3 block area and am having issues with longer than expected drive times.

GOAL: To create an optimized route plan for 3 garbage trucks within a specified test area using the Vehicle Routing Problem Solver within Network Analyst.

Process To Date:

  1. I created a topology layer with rules for the data set. The rules include all the points (stop signs, traffic lights, truck end and start locations) must be covered by a line and lines (roads) must not have dangles.

  2. Create a network data set for the roads layer. Within the roads attribute table I have created a new field containing drive time in minutes for each road segment using speed limit and distance. This new field was used within the network data set creation to allow me to use the Vehicle Route Problem solver.

  3. A new Vehicle Route Problem layer was created. All of the appropriate fields (orders, depots, routes, point barriers) were filled in. Pickup location for the orders was set to right side of vehicle and truck start and dump locations were set to either side. Point barriers were set for stop signs and has an added cost of about 4 seconds per stop sign. The orders were filled with centroid points created from a building layer. These points were snapped to the roads layer within the orders options.

  4. The rest of the appropriate information was completed (to my knowledge) such as route properties and order count per truck. There are approximately 200 stops that I tried to split up evenly for the 3 trucks.

  5. After the process was run, I received my 3 completed routes but they did not seem in any way efficient and they seemed to overlap. Some trucks even seemed to stop in the middle of the road and turn around. The total drive time per truck for around 67 houses was around 10 hours.

Here is the completed route system:

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What can be changed within my process to allow for a more realistic drive time? I am aware that there may be some issue within my process for I am relatively new to the Network Analyst extension for ArcMap.

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    It sounds like you are seeking a project review which I think is too broad for our focused Q&A format.
    – PolyGeo ♦
    Commented Jan 15, 2017 at 9:56
  • 1
    Welcome to GIS SE. As a new user please take the Tour. We utilize a "Focused question / Best answer" model here and, as currently written, this question is not focused on a specific issue. Please edit the question.
    – Vince
    Commented Jan 15, 2017 at 15:17
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    I recommend splitting this into 2 questions. You can duplicate the intro information and just ask different questions. Then you will get focused answers to each question. Questions are 1 - how to improve the model to decrease route drive times? 2 - How do I prevent overlapping routes?
    – jbalk
    Commented Jan 16, 2017 at 0:39

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