Logistics & Mobility// topic
Routing, dispatch and optimisation
In short
The planning problem itself: capacity and time windows, live traffic, mid-day re-optimisation, and the dispatcher screen where an optimiser's output either gets used or gets overridden.
7 pages
definitions
- Service time: the minutes at the kerb that decide the planEvery route plan carries an assumption about how long a stop takes. In most fleets it is one number, applied everywhere, and nobody has ever measured it.definition6 min
- The travel-time matrix: the input that decides the planThe solver never sees a road. It sees a table of durations between every pair of stops, and every mistake in that table becomes a plan that cannot be driven.definition6 min
- Vehicle profile: why a car route and a truck route are different networksA consumer navigation route given to a heavy vehicle is not a rough version of the right answer. It is a route through roads the vehicle is not allowed to use.definition7 min
diagnostics
- The optimiser made a plan and the desk rebuilt it by hand before eightSystematic override is not resistance to change. It is an unwritten requirements document being typed into your software every morning, one drag-and-drop at a time.diagnostic10 min
- The plan came back complete and forty stops are not in itA solver that reports success while leaving forty stops unassigned is answering a different question from the one you asked. Relaxing one constraint family at a time tells you which.diagnostic10 min
- The route crosses itself twice and the driver has already resequenced itA route that doubles back is either obeying a constraint the map cannot draw or genuinely bad. Only one of those is fixed by re-optimising; the other is fixed by explaining.diagnostic9 min
- The solve still has not finished and the first van is loadedMost teams tune the solver and wait longer. In production systems the matrix is usually the slow half, and no search parameter touches it.diagnostic9 min
Other topics in Logistics & Mobility
See allTelematics and the live vehicle data planeWhere vehicle position and state actually come from — phone-as-sensor versus installed hardware, ping frequency and cost, geofences, and how to store and render a live map that stays honest at fleet scale.9 pagesETA prediction and shipment visibilityWhat the person waiting is told, and how wrong it is allowed to be — ETA models, confidence, exception alerts, tracking pages, and the difference between a promised window and an observed one.1 page
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