In case your business needs require you to take Driver and Vehicle costs into account when optimizing routes, this feature allows you to do just that. This feature is an extension to the Cost calculation feature (meaning you would need to have this feature as a part of your subscription package to have Cost-based Optimization as a viable option) and is available on both the Default (Base) and Advanced engine.
To enable this feature, navigate to Configuration ⇒ Optimization ⇒ Additional options.
The new configuration option and engine upgrades enable optimization for minimal Vehicle cost. The idea behind this feature is to come up with the same shortest Routes from the Depot but to prioritize Vehicles that are more cost-efficient instead of the more expensive ones(if capacity allows).
For example, if you have 2 very large trucks that cost $100/km, and 2 small trucks that cost $10/km, the optimization will take that cost into account and prioritize the cheaper vehicles in the optimization, while normally with this feature switched off, eLogii will only consider the Capacity and other Driver attributes.
The cost inputs that are taken into account are:
Vehicle per km/mile
Vehicle per hour
Vehicle per day (fixed cost)
Driver per hour
Driver per day
In case both Vehicle and Driver costs are set, they will be combined.
A few things to note:
Currently, it is not possible to include cost per unit of dimension (only time/distance / fixed)
Tiered/total costs inputs don’t apply here because there's no way for the system to know whether the Route will be for example 100 km and cost 15$, or 200km and cost 50$ until the optimization is done. Because of this, the only inputs that make sense here are per unit of distance, or per unit of time on a Driver/Vehicle level. Tiered/total cost can still be used to calculate total route cost after it’s been produced, but not within the optimization
For this feature to work properly, all vehicles need to have some sort of cost defined that is not 0 - as otherwise by default the cost for a vehicle is 0, cheapest, and it would always be used.