Ask a planner how long a delivery takes and you will get a number. Twenty minutes. It is a good number. It is also, at almost every individual stop, wrong.
The articulated truck with a tail lift takes longer than the van. The first stop of the day takes no time at all, because the vehicle was loaded overnight and nothing has to be moved.…
04:30. The driver badges in at the warehouse. For the next two hours it is picking, checking and loading. This is work, it is logged as work, and the working time clock is running.
06:30. The vehicle pulls out of the yard, and the optimised route begins.…
A tanker carrying fuel is not allowed to wander. The operator’s safety rule says the vehicle must reach a fuel station at least every 80 kilometres — not on average, not most days, but on every route in every plan. An optimiser that produces a beautiful 95-kilometre gap between two stations has produced an unusable plan.…
You’re sending a truck from Paris to London and would like to calculate the actual toll costs and emissions for the trip afterward. The GPS tracker recorded positions the whole way. You run those positions through track matching and instead of one continuous track, you get two separate pieces: a line through France, a line through England, and nothing where the Channel should be.…
Where exactly is a postcode? When you only have the code and no street, a geocoder still needs to return a single point on the map. Until now, the Geocoding & Places API picked that point by calculating the centroid of all street segments assigned to that postcode.…
