Express Logistic Solutions
ELS is a small, innovative company based in Banbury, Oxfordshire, consulting to the freight, transport and travel industries where they regularly make light work of heavy-weight logistical problems. Their clever "Bedouin" transport scheduling application is respected for its astute resolutions. They required a system to find optimum routing for vehicles according to varied criteria, such as the different sizes of cargos, the multi-functional carrying capacity of vehicles and available time windows for collection and delivery.
Normally a hugely processor-intensive task to exhaustively calculate such routes, we researched and provided a novel heuristic routine, developed specifically for ELS, to return sapient routes employing minimal processor demands.
The well-documented 'travelling salesman' problem asks the most efficient path a salesman should take to visit all of his customers, re-tracing as few of his steps as possible. The calculations become exponentially harder for each additional requirement burdened upon him. Using traditional algorithms, a contemporary workstation required ten minutes for a short itinerary once cargo constraints had been imposed. Our algorithms reduced this overhead to less than 1 second.
The solution was developed in Borland Delphi 5 with an Interbase back-end database server. To allow ultimate scalability, the precision routing engine was wrapped as an MTS object which could be called through IIS web servers. We also developed a processor-load unit which seamlessly spread calculations across any number of configured PCs in a network as and when required, using DCOM to communicate the results.