Real-time planning: focused replanning

There are many situations where Real-time planning is necessary.

When planning is already over-constrained, ie, all shifts are at full capacity and many visits remain unassigned, adding important visits that must be assigned is challenging.

By default, the initial phase of solving tries to assign every unassigned visit, including lower-priority visits that a previous planning run left unassigned. Attempting to place these lower-priority visits takes a substantial amount of time and leaves less time for more promising optimizations.

To overcome this, you can specify which visits Timefold should focus on during replanning with the replanningFocus field:

{
  "modelInput": {
    "replanningFocus": {
      "visitIds": [
        "Visit A",
        "Visit B"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Timefold considers the visits listed in replanningFocus as candidates to be swapped with already assigned, but less important, visits. Visits that don’t match the replanning focus are not considered during the initial phase, which saves time.

In order for visits included in visitIds to be scheduled during replanning, their assignment must result in a better score than the current assignment they are swapped for. Giving the visits a higher priority or an earlier SLA will increase the impact they have on the score.

visitIds must contain at least one visit ID, and each ID must be unique.

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