Creating Vehicles and Vehicle Set

The vehicles are created from the Fleet Tab in Management Panel. The vehicles automatically constitute the Vehicle Set. Therefore, there is no specific Vehicle Set creation operation to be done.

Note the following:

1. Creating a new vehicle does not save the created vehicle into the database of logvrp.
2. Recently created vehicles are in an unsaved state, and added to the Vehicle List in Fleet Tab of Management Panel.
3. If you refresh the page, you will lose your unsaved vehicles.

To create a new vehicle, the following steps should be done:

1. Open the Fleet Tab in Management Panel.
2. Click "Add Vehicle" button in the Fleet Tab.
3. Vehicle Details Window will appear. In this window, fiil the vehicle properties as explained below.
4. After filling in the form of Vehicle Details Window, click "Add Vehicle" button.
5. The vehicle will be listed in Vehicle List in Fleet Tab of the Management Panel.

New Vehicle Details Window

Number of vehicles: Adding more than one vehicle at once.

• Vehicle Name: This field is automatically filled, but the user can specify it manually.
• Starting Position: The starting position of the vehicle, i.e. the parking position where the vehicle is located before starting its delivery/pick-up jobs. This must be a station, either a depot or a customer station. If the vehicle starting position is not known prior and you want logvrp to suggest or find, starting position of vehicles then you should set optimization goal to "Vehicle Decision". After setting optimization goal to "Vehicle Decision" you can set undefined for the starting position of the vehicle. If you do not have/own a fixed fleet of vehicles and you outsource the vehicles based on the route plans that logvrp provides, then you can choose optimization goal has vehicle desicion.
• Stopping Position: The stopping position of the vehicle, i.e. the last position where the vehicle parks after completing its delivery/pick-up jobs. This must be a station, either a depot or a customer station. After vehicle completes its route, if it is not important where the vehicle parks or goes, then it may be left undefined or unclear. As an example, after vehicle completes its route, if the vehicle goes to driver's home and if it is not significant in terms of costs, in this situation you can set stopping position as undefined. In this situation the route will end at the latest point of the completed routes. If you want the vehicle to return to depot after completing the route, you can specify it as a specific depot. logvrp calculates routes accordingly.
• Active: Specifies whether the vehicle is active for now or not. The inactive vehicles are not taken into account in VRP solution calculations by the algorithms.
• Capacity (Kg): The capacity of the vehicle in kilograms.
• Load Type: The load types of the vehicle.
• Average Speed (Km/Hour): The average speed of the vehicle in kilometers per hour.
• Oil Cost Per Km ($): The oil cost of the vehicle per kilometers in dollars.
• Fix Cost ($): The fixed cost of the vehicle in dollars.
• Departure Date: The earliest date that the vehicle can depart and start delivery/pick-up jobs. Automatically set to the current date, the user can secify it manually.
• Departure Time: The earliest time that the vehicle can depart and start delivery/pick-up jobs. Automatically set to the current time, the user can secify it manually.

Note the following:

1. In order to create a vehicle, there must be at least one depot or one station.
2. When a vehicle is created and its starting and stopping positions are set, then the vehicle becomes dependent to those stations. So, the vehicles become associated to the current Station Set.
3. Then the Station Set becomes the related Station Set of that Vehicle Set.
4. This concept is important in logvrp, because the Vehicle Sets can be loaded with only its related Station Set.