Lowering the cost of using good schedules
We are proud to announce the availability of our vehicle and engineer scheduling engine. This is the result of many months of development and refinement. The scheduling engine makes the decisions about which vehicle or engineer should perform which visits to which sites and in what order.
This is a frequently occurring problem in many industries, but despite its apparent simplicity, it is a problem which is very complex. In fact, there are more than 100 different sequences for performing just 5 separate site visits with just a single vehicle, but this number rises amazingly quickly so that there are about 3.6 million different sequences for just 10 visits, and for 15 visits there are about 1.3 trillion possibilities. Of course, real-world problems are usually much bigger and more complex.
Many organisations planning engineers or vehicles movements manage the problem by allocating territories, using standard routes, modifying what was done before or just plain guesswork. None of these methods will make the best use of valuable resources on a day-to-day basis. Clearly it is impossible to try all the possible choices to find the best.
Fortunately there is another way. Researchers have been developing different mathematical models, algorithms and heuristics that give very good solutions to these problems in a reasonable time. We have taken some of these proven techniques and added some refinements of our own to produce a ready-made vehicle and engineer scheduling engine which is small, flexible and affordable.
Most vehicle and engineer scheduling software is only available with built-in support for maps, Gantt-charts, database interfaces, etc. We have deliberately designed and implemented our vehicle and engineer scheduling engine to be directly embeddable in other systems. Deliberately avoiding extra features that may not be required allows us to offer a simple system that will be able to work with your current systems, so that you avoid paying for them again.
Our vehicle scheduling engine has been designed and implemented from the start to do just one thing and do it right – solving the scheduling problem.
The Technical Bit
The vehicle scheduling engine uses several algorithms together to give robust performance on a wider range of problems than can normally be achieved with a single algorithm.
It is implemented in standard C++, and makes extensive use of object-oriented programming to ensure modularity, flexibility and efficiency. We provide a programming interface for specifying the problem, controlling the search for a solution and accessing the best solution found. It has been tested with a variety of compilers on Microsoft Windows and the GNU C++ compiler used on Linux.