Overview - Modelling Planning Route Optimisation

Aptean Routing and Scheduling – Paragon Edition

For your planned use of Paragon, we would provide a number of Paragon Planning Systems for operational and strategic planning use.

Paragon takes in details of the orders to be delivered/collected, the transport resources available, and general information such as shift details, break requirements, drop times and site details. Using a highly developed algorithm designed specifically for optimising road-based transport operations, the Paragon software calculates the most effective delivery and collection sequences that meet promised time windows, allocates loads to appropriate vehicles and drivers, and uses digital mapping to calculate road-based journey times and distances.

The Paragon software is also highly configurable, with many parameters that make it capable of handling the wide range of transport constraints that can arise. As a result, users come from all stages in the supply chain – manufacturing, wholesale, retail, parcels/mail and home delivery – and span vertical sectors that include the building supplies, food and drink, Hi-Tech goods, furniture, clothing, pharmaceutical and healthcare, waste management, service management, automotive and petrochemical industries.

Paragon includes Windows drop down menu control, data editors, automatic location geocoding, times and distance calculations, automatic routing and scheduling, interactive graphics facilities for modifying routes, interactive time vehicle utilisation bar chart and reporting facilities.

Paragon also caters for operations involving multi drop or single drop trips, multi trip routes, multi day routes, daily or weekly scheduling, deliveries and collections, multiple driver’s shifts, order priority, delivery time constraints, vehicle access constraints, driver’s shift details and drivers’ hour’s regulations.

When used as a strategic planning system Paragon would enable you to model the route planning for your existing and any potential future depot network. You could readily model alternative scenarios such as validating fixed routes, defining vehicle fleet types, understanding the effect of new customers on the existing operation and assessing what effect offering differing time windows may have.

Integrated Fleets Paragon enables a single planner to schedule routes for multiple depots with either fixed or flexible boundaries, taking into account resource availability at each depot. Alternatively orders can be constrained to a particular depot based on product availability.

Paragon's Integrated Fleets enables vehicles and drivers at multiple sites to be treated as a single integrated transport resource, so that movements from different locations can be combined into efficient routes that reduce overall empty running.

This generates efficient routes which increases asset utilisation, improves productivity and reduces empty mileage.

Paragon Strategic and Tactical Use

Many of our clients are successfully using Paragon for Strategic as well as operational planning.

When used as a strategic planning system Paragon would enable you to model the route planning for your existing depot. You could readily model alternative scenarios such as validating fixed routes, defining vehicle fleet types, understanding the effect of new delivery locations on the existing operation and assessing what effect offering differing time windows may have.

Some of the key facilities that are available in our software that will help address strategic use requirements include:

• the ability to compare the cost of alternative scenarios for example total route cost, cost per drop, and cost per mile
• the capability to hold a large number of different scenarios and their results, and the ability to switch between them and if necessary combine delivery requirements
• the ability to import and validate fixed routes
• planning multiple trips per vehicle per day
• handling daily and weekly schedules
• the interactive manipulation of routes and call details
• an interactive bar chart display showing the use of vehicles or drivers over the day or period
• the ability to universally adjust all time windows to test the effect of tighter or slacker constraints
• the ability to define that an order will not be available for despatch until a particular time, or similarly that a collection must be brought back to the depot by a particular time
• user defined Macros, Functions and Filters allow easy manipulation of single or multiple customer and call details.

Local Depot Access

In Multi User deployments we can provide additional Paragon Multi User Workbenches for local depot users to enable multiple users to review each schedule simultaneously.

The benefits of utilising additional Workbenches include:

• Enables several people to view & change the plan
• Retains the benefit of local involvement
• Plan can be changed based on local circumstances
• Transport resources allocated at branch level; overall transport optimisation carried out centrally
• Provides visibility of the transport plan to related departments
  • Warehouse, customer services and distribution management
• More than one planner can review the schedules before sign-off – routes released to warehouse earlier

Enhanced Mapping

You may also include the following enhanced mapping options to provide increased planning accuracy.

INRIX Average Road Speed Data

This option provides the average road speed information on major roads. This average speed data has been derived by detailed analysis of the average speeds achieved by goods vehicles on the road network. This is based on data provided by INRIX, and provides better estimates of journey times for the roads where the average speed information is available.

This enables the mapping within Paragon to provide accurate journey travel time and distance estimates allowing for the regional and local variation in the road network.

Use of this speed data would help improve the accuracy of your planning and help reduce the time you may need to calibrate the road speeds for use within Paragon.

HERE GB Street Level Mapping Detail

We are able to supply full street level map data sourced from HERE use with our Paragon routing and scheduling system.

Combining this data with sophisticated routing logic enables the Paragon system to be used for automatic routing and scheduling at street level detail, taking account of drive restriction information (DRI) including:

• One-way streets
• No entry
• No left turn /no right turn
• Must turn left / must turn right.

In addition, the street level map displays enable the user to picture the day’s routes and schedules at a high degree of accuracy. The overall schedule is produced using times and distances planned to the nearest second and metre.

Truck Attribute Data

As an option we can also provide Truck Attribute Data for the HERE GB Street Level Map above. This enhances the detail of the map further by including vehicle Height, Width, Weight, Length (HWWL) Truck Attribute Data.

By using Truck Attribute Data with your Paragon routing and scheduling software, you can more easily create achievable transport plans that avoid truck restrictions such as low bridges, or roads where weight restrictions apply. The route optimisation plan will automatically calculate transport plans that prevent detours, reducing mileage and streamlining the creation of cost effective, feasible transport plans.