Workforce Scheduling Service Objective: Minimize Travel

Available in: Lightning Experience

Available in: Enterprise and Unlimited Editions

Include this objective to control how much you trade off other scheduling preferences like scheduling as soon as possible, to minimize the overall time spent on travel.

During schedule creation, the objective calculates the amount of travel time added to the schedule. Added travel means the objective considers the difference in total travel time between the old schedule and the new schedule. For example, if a new appointment needs to be scheduled, and three options for the appointment exist.

• Option 1: Overall travel time added to the schedule is 4 minutes.
• Option 2: Overall travel time added to the schedule is 30 minutes.
• Option 3: Overall travel time added to the schedule is 132 minutes.

Of the three options, option 1 is preferred because the difference in travel time between the old schedule and this option is the lowest of the available options (4 minutes).

If you don’t want the objective to consider travel to and from home in travel calculations, you can select to exclude home base travel. Excluding home base travel can improve response speed and ensure the service resource with the shortest travel time to the site is dispatched, regardless of their home base location at the start or end of their shift. This capability is critical for high-urgency industries like Roadside Assistance and Ambulatory Services, where quick arrival to a site outweighs the additional travel time for a resource to return home. With home base travel, the engine calculates the total travel increase for the entire day—including the return trip home—which can penalize the closest resource if their home base is far from the site. By excluding home travel, the engine focuses solely on the travel between service appointments, ensuring the closest resource is dispatched.

To exclude travel to home, travel from home, or both from the Minimize Travel service objective’s calculations, add the Exclude Travel To Home Base and Exclude Travel From Home Base options to your Minimize Travel service objective page layout.

Each second of added travel time is penalized. For example, 120 minutes of travel is scored better than 150 minutes of travel. The penalty value is calculated as X minutes of added travel time divided by a 120-minute scale. (Travel time greater than 120 minutes is still graded on a 120-minute scale, so for example, 150 minutes of travel are penalized more than 130 minutes of travel.) The total penalty points are multiplied by the weight of the Minimize Travel objective in the scheduling policy to determine the resulting score of the schedule for that appointment.