Optrak4

Optrak4 displays the solution for planners via tables, maps and the timeline functionality, as well as overview layers displaying your trips in one-line summary form, giving the vehicle, driver, distance, number of deliveries and utilisation.

Utilising the Timeline feature, driver and vehicle activity can be shown either spatially on the map or in a Gantt-style view, including mandated rest periods, planned loading times (integrated with the loading plans) and delivery requirements.

Optrak4 makes use of a detailed time-model, both for driving (using historic road speeds to give highly precise modelling of rush-hour and other journeys) and for loading and unloading – where timings can be based on customer site facilities, vehicle facilities (e.g. tail lifts or pumps) and product types.

Optrak’s schedules match EU and UK drivers’ hours legislation including full or split breaks and overnights.

Optrak4 creates a detailed loading diagram of all customer vehicles (whether standard or multi-compartment) to optimise the loading of the vehicle for maximum capacity. This loading is fully integrated into the routing solution, taking into the account the specific dimension/element aspects of each order with the trip optimisation process to ensure that loading and unloading is sequential for the trip and utilises vehicles at close to 100% capacity, leading to significant vehicle utilisation.

Loaders are available for both packaged goods (boxes, pallets, roll-cages etc.) and bulk handling – such as oil or chemical delivery in multi- compartment tankers.

Optrak4 uses a variety of route construction techniques and local search operations to produced optimised trips. We are actively involved with the academic research community and are continually looking at how the latest research techniques for solving the VRP (Vehicle Routing Problem) can be transferred into real-world problems.

Users can interact with the system manually to calibrate the optimising process – activating and deactivating resources and orders and freezing specific trips/orders whilst optimising other areas of the same solution.

In Optrak4, you can manually edit trips following optimisation to test the impact of breaking certain parameters (such as individual time-windows) in order to make a better solution. Optrak4 has a rich set of tools for trip editing, including:-

• Creating new trips
• Drag and drop from un-routed orders to trips and between trips
• Reversing trips or sections of trips.
• Inserting an order or set of orders at “best position”.
• Optimising an individual trip after manual editing.

Optrak4 uses detailed street maps, able to cope with the most stringent requirements – such as planning delivery of 2,500 parcels into just 2 London postcodes (SE1 and SW1).

Users can view and apply multiple layers on the map, as well as deselecting/selecting trips to view specific routing aspects or delivery issues.

Optrak4 works with external carrier rate tables to help the planner decide whether to route goods on own fleet, bring in (and plan) external resources or use 3rd party delivery services such as parcel or pallet networks.