StreetServicer, has been developed for routing and sequencing clusters of calls on the same street section, or servicing each side of the street separately. This type of street routing is essential for services such as road gritting, milk and newspaper deliveries, refuse collection and street cleaning.
Conventional vehicle routing and scheduling systems consider each call point separately before allocating them to a route. Consequently a street segment will not necessarily always be treated as a logical group of calls.
StreetServicer groups calls together and allocates them to street segments before scheduling them. Mary Short, managing director at MapMechanics, explains: “This not only avoids unnecessary repeat visits to the same sections of road, but also reduces very large problems posed by operations with many call points to a much more manageable and faster street-based calculation.”
Typically a user will start by allocating call points to separate territories before running StreetServicer to route the calls efficiently within their territories. For the first part of the process MapMechanics provides OptiSite, which creates territories by minimising costs while ensuring capacity constraints are not violated. Alternatively, users can simply make their own territories by database or geographical selection.
The user can then run StreetServicer with one of a range of street map data sets such as Ordnance Survey or NAVTEQ. Call points are accurately allocated to street segments on the basis of their complete address, and the routes generated respect one-way streets and other traffic constraints contained within the user’s chosen street data set.
The user can also specify whether specific road segments need be serviced in only one pass, or each side of the road needs to be scheduled separately (ideal for wide roads or street cleaning applications).
Not only does StreetServicer build logical, optimised routes, it also generates reports for the driver, detailing the call sequence and route plan. The reports can be tailored to meet the organisation’s specific requirements, and can be viewed over the Web or in mainstream computer applications such as Microsoft Access and Excel.
StreetServicer has been written as a module of the GeoConcept mapping system which means results created by the product can be analysed and manipulated in numerous ways in the main GeoConcept application. |
