Case studyTour Planning
How to solve the highly complex task of moving goods and people in an efficient and sustainable way with one of the most powerful and sophisticated algorithms in the industry?
Delivery Tour Planning
Today’s delivery algorithms provide optimized tour planning and routing for delivery services based on a variety of factors and constraints. They go beyond just using an efficient heuristic to tackle the underlying travelling salesman problem per se, but take into account other variables like e.g. time-windows for delivery or the matching of certain goods to specific vehicle types.
Our customer, Greenplan, subsidiary of DHL, has one of the most powerful and sophisticated algorithms in the industry for the highly complex task of moving goods and people in an efficient and sustainable way.
Challenge
The task at hand is to provide the frontend application for planning, display and analysis of delivery tours, requiring a deep understanding of the algorithm at work. Shipment details and vehicle data are examples of basic variables, but numerous additional vehicle and capacity parameters as well as detailed information on pickup and delivery locations provide more relevant input and output data.
The tour planning results have to be provided in a detailed, yet clean and transparent manner, making use of geospatial data to provide intelligent map views as well as tour details.
Implementation
Foundation of a successful implementation is the sound understanding of the underlying business logic, in this case the routing and dispatching algorithm.
Taking the perspective of our customer Greenplan, the most important challenge to be solved is the user-friendly interaction with the system along all relevant parameters. This means on one hand understanding the most relevant requirements of all user types, e.g. dispatchers, and on the other hand especially a transparent, operable output of planned tours, and various options for modification, analysis and optimization.
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