Bulk Plan Performance and Tuning

The main objective of bulk plan is to recommend an efficient way to transport a group of orders from their sources to destinations by optimally consolidating the orders into one or more shipments. Bulk plan makes several key recommendations for the orders such as, the right choice of orders to combine to form a shipment, the right sequence of pickups and deliveries, the right sized equipment and the mode and carrier for transporting the shipment. The bulk plan also determines the cost of the shipments and the schedules for pickup and delivery at each stop. In many instances, these orders also have a choice of flowing through a network of cross-docks, ports, rail terminals, and so on. In such cases, the optimal decision also includes the order’s route through the network. Several business considerations are taken into account in forming the shipments. Among the important ones are the carrier rate information, location calendars, pickup and delivery windows on the orders, size and dimensions of ship units on the orders, driver’s hours of service restrictions, and available equipment.

By orders we mean either order releases or order movements unless specified.

See the following for more details

• Data Setup describes the objects involved during bulk planing.
• Bulk Plan Processes and Routing Methods describes the bulk plan process and routing methods at a high level and the pieces that comprise the bulk plan process. This section provides a high level look at the processes and routing methods used for bulk plan. The details about the algorithms and how to best tune bulk plan are described under solution quality tuning.
• Solution Quality Tuning describes the algorithms that can be used to tune the solution quality of the bulk plan functionality.
• Shipment Groups in Bulk Planning describes how shipment groups are built in the bulk plan post process step, how shipment group rules that have been defined determine the circumstances in which shipments are assembled into shipment groups during planning and related parameters.
• Performance Tuning looks at reasons why some bulk plans run slowly, while other bulk plans, even with larger data sets run fast. Many performance problems though can be resolved through careful data modeling, algorithm tuning and multi-thread property settings.
• Diagnostics -provides tips for diagnosing issues during bulk planning. This also includes Ask Oracle - Container Optimization and Object and Method Instrumentation.