Category: PTV Developer
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From a coordinate to a country
A vehicle’s position arrives as a pair of numbers. Almost everything you want to do with it next depends on a single derived fact: which country is this point in? Bill a cross-border allowance, pick a toll scheme, log a frontier crossing, each one starts with the answer.…
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A place that was really just a street
A user enters a postal code and receives a list of locations. Most of them are obviously correct. One of them is a location with a postal code that doesn’t actually exist.
Postal code points are composed of street segments, and where two postal codes meet or where two locations border each other, a single street segment may have attributes from both sides at the same time.…
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When you want routing to ignore the clock
There is an assumption built into most routing requests: that a good travel time reflects the moment of travel. Rush hour is slower than midnight; a usual Tuesday is slower than a quiet Sunday. For a live ETA, that is exactly right, you want the number to move with reality.…
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The Depot Has a Capacity Too
Three loading docks. Two forklifts. Eleven people on the early shift. Whatever the optimiser decides, that building can move a certain amount of goods in a day and not one pallet more.
Load limits in planning have traditionally been asked at one place only: what fits on the vehicle.…
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The Second Whiteboard
In a lot of transport offices there are two planning systems. One is the software. The other is a whiteboard, or a spreadsheet, or one person’s memory, and it tracks the things the software does not know about: which truck is free after the morning shift, which trailer is off the road until Thursday, whether the crew that needs 90 minutes to sanitise its equipment can make the next job.…
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Nine Hours on the Road Is Not Nine Hours of Driving
Cap a route at nine hours and you have said something about the shift. You have said almost nothing about the driving.
Those nine hours contain loading at the depot, service time at each customer, waiting for a time window to open, and the driver’s breaks.…