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Plan long-haul continuous routes with night stops along the way
Plan long-haul continuous routes with night stops along the way

Learn how to plan multi-day routes that start and end at specified locations with night rests along your continuous route

Sergey Shurygin avatar
Written by Sergey Shurygin
Updated this week

Mapsly allows you to create a multi-day route with night stops along the way, for one or multiple users at once. Mapsly will do this by planning one continuous route for each user from start to finish across all their activities first, and then breaking them all down to daily routes based on users' working schedule while determining the finish locations for each daily route, which will also serve as the starting location on the following day.

To achieve this, check the Continuous routes box at the bottom of the routing panel's parameters:

How a continuous route is split into daily routes

When splitting a continuous route into daily routes for a user, Mapsly follows several rules:

  1. If the end of the working day ends on the way to the next job, Mapsly will end the day at the previous job's location and time and will start the next day at this location.
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    ​NOTE. In our September 2024 release, you'll be able to direct Mapsly to end the day en route at the location where the user currently is at the end of their working day and resume going towards their job at the start of the next day.
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  2. If the end of the working day ends in the middle of a job, by default — unless instructed otherwise by the Split jobs and Overtime parameters — Mapsly will end the working day at this job's location at its start time, and will plan this job entirely for the start of the next day.
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Split jobs

Use this parameter to split long jobs that cannot be fully completed on the current day into multiple parts, with the first part — until the end of the current day, and the second part — for the next day. If a job cannot be completed in two days, Mapsly will break it into as many days as necessary to complete the job based on the user's working schedule.

This parameter is especially useful for jobs that may routinely span multiple days.

NOTE. When splitting jobs, Mapsly may plan beyond the number of days indicated in Period. If, according to the user's working schedule, s/he is not working on an additional day that Maplsy needs to include in planning to complete the split job, Mapsly would use the working hours of the preceding working day.

Overtime

Use this parameter to automatically extend a working day, which otherwise would end in the middle of a route job thus requiring this job to be planned entirely for the next day, by adding the time needed to complete this job on the same day.

For example, if a working day ends at 6 pm with an 1.5-hour job in a continuous route planned to start at 5 pm, Mapsly would extend this particular working day until 6:30 pm to allow this job to be fully completed on the same day.

When using Overtime together with Split jobs:

  • First, Mapsly will decide if the job should be split in according to the Split jobs.
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    • If the job was split, no overtime will be added to the current day.
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    • If the job was not split (because it's shorter than Longer than), Mapsly will check if the job can be completed within Overtime:
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      • If the job can be completed within overtime, Mapsly will add the necessary overtime to the current day.
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      • If the job cannot be completed within overtime, Mapsly will plan the job for the next day.

NOTE. In our September 2024 release, we will add a new Min part size sub-parameter to Split jobs, ensuring that when splitting jobs, each part is not shorter than Min part size. When used together with Overtime:

  • First, Mapsly will check if the job should be split per the Longer than and Min part size parameters in the Split jobs section.
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    • If the job needs to be split:
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      • If there's enough time until the end of the current working day to make the first part of the job longer than or equal to Min part size, no overtime will be added, and Mapsly will make the first part as long as possible — to utilize all the remaining working day.
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        • However, if the remaining part of the job happens to be shorter than Min part size but can be completed within Overtime, Mapsly will add such overtime — to allow the entire job to be completed at once without splitting.
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      • If there isn't enough time until the end of the current working day to make the first part of the job longer than or equal to Min part size:
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        • If the first part with the duration of Min part size can be completed within Overtime, Mapsly will add the minimal necessary overtime to the current day to allow the first part of Min part size to be completed.
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          • However, if the remaining part of the job happens to be shorter than Min part size but can be completed within Overtime, Mapsly will extend overtime — to allow the entire job to be completed at once without splitting.
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        • If the first part with the duration of Min part size cannot be completed with Overtime, the job will not be split.
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    • If the job doesn't need to be split (because it's shorter than Longer than), Mapsly will check if the job can be completed within Overtime:

      • If the job can be completed within overtime, Mapsly will add the necessary overtime to the current day.
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      • If the job cannot be completed within Overtime, Mapsly will plan the job for the next day.

Limitations

Since continuous routes are broken down to daily routes in post-processing after the optimization rather than within the optimization itself, Continuous routes mode has the following limitations:

  1. The following user/vehicle parameters will be ignored: Max jobs, Min jobs, Min activities.
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  2. Jobs' availability window (open hours) will be ignored.
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  3. Historic traffic information will not be accounted for.
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  4. Time-window type breaks will not be planned.
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    ​NOTE 1. At this moment, you may use jobs' preparation time or departure delay parameters to add some time reserve which will add up to allow users to have a break.
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    ​NOTE 2. In our September 2024 release, we will add a Max driving time type break that will be available in Continuous routes. With this break type, Mapsly will automatically add breaks of the specified length to ensure that a user does not drive more than the designated maximum amount of time without rest.

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