Manual intervention

Different industries have different scheduling requirements, and it is not always possible to automatically assign and optimize every route.

In field service routing you can pin one or many visits when a specific technician must be assigned to a specific visit or sequence of visits.

Even after you’ve implemented fully automated and optimized routing, there are still times when it is necessary to manually intervene and assign specific visits manually. For more information about pinning see Pinning visits in real-time planning.

This guide explains the benefits of using pinning in different scenarios:

Gradual adoption of the technology

Complex technology is rarely adopted all at once.

With pinning you can gradually introduce Timefold into the routing process as you build trust in the plans it generates. This also gives you time to fine-tune the constraints and constraint weights used in your datasets.

To gradually adopt Timefold, decide which portion of the route plan Timefold optimizes (for instance, starting with one region, depot, or team of technicians) and gradually increase the scope over time.

Real-time planning

Real-time planning makes it possible to update a route plan while it’s being executed, for instance, to add an emergency visit, handle a technician calling in sick, or account for a job that is running over. You can use pinning in real-time planning to minimize the disruption caused by replanning.

See the Pinning visits in real-time planning guide for more information.

Experiments

Pinning can also be used to run experiments on your datasets. By pinning a portion of the dataset you can answer "what would the result be if" questions that help you improve the quality of your plans over time. For instance, you might pin one technician’s route and observe how the optimizer assigns the remaining visits, or pin a visit with a specific time constraint to evaluate how the rest of the schedule adapts.

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