A Tool to Assist in Transportation Planning

Transportation planning, more precisely vehicle routing, has been widely studied in academic circles since 1950’s. The principle is to simultaneously assign all the orders for available vehicles and design routes for each vehicle. The solutions generated by optimisation follow given restrictions such as driving times, time windows and vehicle capacities.

Computational planning and optimisation have been available in the market for few decades already. However, only recent developments in IT sector have provided the necessary tools to solve real-life vehicle routing problems.

The Project

In the University of Jyväskylä, Finland research has been conducted on the implementation and deployment of optimisation systems from the perspective of computation and software engineering in a project called CO-SKY. It has been funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. One of the main goals has been to develop an optimisation tool accessible to the users through cloud services. In parallel to research, commercial preparations have been undertaken and business activities have been gradually launched during the project. The service has been developed in close co-operation with wide variety of partners and service providers, for example in the areas of security, field services, transportation companies and also municipalities concerning people transportation.

What is NFleet?

NFleet is a service for transportation planning, assisting the user in the process of designing efficient routes. One of the main aspects of the research has been to figure a way for fast and easy implementation of optimisation for heterogeneous group of users with varying needs. To accomplish this, project has developed an untraditional model and method to facilitate the deployment. Especially the needs and resources of small and medium sized companies are taken into account, as this sector is often ignored by other software providers.

The simplest method to use the service is via web browser: A premade spreadsheet is completed with user’s vehicle and order details consisting time windows and addresses. After optimisation, driving plans for each vehicle are returned to user. Another way to use NFleet is to integrate it as a part of enterprise resource planning system. For this we offer API-tools.

NFleet is cost-effective even if the amount of vehicles is less than 10, however, it can also support larger fleets of vehicles and orders. Regardless of the method of usage, pricing principle is pay-per-use. As a result, the customer is able to gain immediate return on their investment.

For more info see our website – www.co-sky.fi.