by Max Stevens-Guille
Excerpted from Transportation Technology Today, February 2004
Here are Six Criteria for Selecting a Route Optimization Solution
The old saying "there's more than one way to skin a cat" applies to routing. There are thousands of ways to get to a destination, some better than others.
Cost and safety are the top factors in determining the best route for your drivers. Drivers should have routes that are easy to follow and avoid low-clearance and weight-limited sections of road. Trucks should also follow the highest class of road for the longest distance. They should bypass metropolitan areas when possible, avoid sharp turns and stay clear of residential areas. If that weren't enough to consider when making route selections, then add balancing these goals against the constant cost constraints of your fleet operations. The goal of a routing system is to take these many, and often conflicting, factors into account to create accurate, consistent, safe and cost-effective routes between locations.
There are 6 criteria you should keep in mind when selecting the best routing solution for your company:
1. Integration with Hardware and Software
To make a truck-to-door routing system work, a routing solution must integrate with both your mobile-communications (hardware) system, and your fleet management (software) system.
With the many mobile communications systems on the market today, the truck's precise location can be captured and communicated to the fleet management system along with a request for directions. The fleet management system then passes this information along with the vehicle's destination to the routing system (such as Maptuit FleetNav Directions™) that calculates the route and generates a set of directions to be passed back to the driver.
From a driver's point of view, the entire process from making the request to getting a response should and can be performed in a matter of seconds - a welcome change from waiting for a dispatcher to look up a customer.
2. High Quality Street Database
In order to direct vehicles to any location, a high-quality street database must be available. Companies like Navtech and GDT have spent literally billions of dollars, and millions of hours to build a more accurate model of the road network. Each street on the road network must be accurately surveyed to determine how it connects to its neighboring segments. Streets are also categorized by road class, attributed with information about address ranges, lane restrictions, and much more. Additional truck-specific databases are required to capture which roads are included in the National Network, which streets are restricted, which bridges and tunnels can't carry truck traffic, along with the location of low-clearance obstacles.
3. Accuracy Counts
Accuracy and coverage count. Roads that are not accurately presented in the routing system pose a number of problems. The first is that of determining where a vehicle is located when it makes a directions request. Returning routes that start from an incorrect location will likely result in poor driver satisfaction - and that's putting it mildly. The second problem with inaccurate surveys is that it becomes impossible to reliably determine how roads intersect. The precise geometry of how roads intersect needs to be taken into account so as to determine whether a truck can make the turn.
Unfortunately, there isn't a central source of information related to heavy-trucks. There is no single agency that collects details about which roads pass through residential neighborhoods and which don't. Consequently, routing systems need to make very sophisticated deductions and pay careful attention to the geometry of roads.
4. Customized Routing
Modern routing systems take many parameters into account such as cost-per-mile and cost-per-hour to determine the fastest and/or cheapest way to a destination. But that isn't enough. The rising cost of fuel is becoming an increasingly significant issue and modern routing engines can now take into account the cost of fuel from the fleet's fueling network when determining a route. To accurately plan a trip, a truck's fuel level, fuel consumption and fuel capacity needs to be entered. From this, the routing system can determine where along the route the driver should refuel, right down to the amount of fuel that should be purchased at each stop.
5. Descriptive Directions
From a route, a set of directions can be calculated. Since many mobile communications devices do not support the delivery of graphical maps, your drivers only have textual directions to follow. The directions must be descriptive to make sure your driver understands where to go. And they must be concise in order to minimize the character count and keep costs in line.
6. Driver Buy-In
Driver buy-in for directions is a key factor in implementing a new routing system. Many drivers are confident of their knowledge of a city or route. However, ignoring directions can have a real cost and result in accidents.
With the number of technological advances being made on a daily basis the selection process can sometimes be quite difficult. However, if you always start the process with some form of criteria (like the ones above) then you can make your selection with confidence.
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