Paragon plans to unveil the latest version of its software, Paragon 5.0, at the Commercial Vehicle Show 2008, Britain’s largest and most successful road transport event. The result of more than a year’s intensive development, Paragon 5.0 represents a major step forward delivering important new features – such as automatic routing enhancements and regional and directional rush hour congestion functionality – to the transport industry. In addition, by linking with its new Resource Manager module, its Route Execution product and Navman Wireless vehicle tracking, Paragon now provides transport operators with a complete routing optimisation, transport management and execution system.
Paragon, the leading provider of transport optimisation and execution solutions, will attend the Commercial Vehicle Show 2008, to be held at the NEC, Birmingham, 15-17 April (Stand No. 6-190), where it plans to unveil a major new version of its routing, scheduling and transport optimisation software, Paragon 5.0.
“The development of Paragon 5.0 follows more than a year’s intensive development and represents a major step forward in transport optimisation technology,” confirms Paragon’s managing director, William Salter. “The latest release incorporates a total of 59 separate enhancements, including several major advancements to our core routing and scheduling functionality, designed to benefit fleets of any size.”
Significant Developments
Additional functionality within Paragon 5.0 includes two very significant developments. Automatic routing enhancements include a powerful new routing engine which takes account of separate resource types during the planning process, including rigids, tractors, trailers and drivers. This parallel scheduling of different resource types enables the accurate planning of dynamic operations where drivers switch vehicles or tractors swap trailers during a schedule.
The regional and directional rush hour congestion feature allows different geographic regions to be created with specific road speed reduction profiles by time of day associated with them. Users can therefore incorporate profiles of rush hour periods for selected road links or specific geographies – such as individual city or town centres – to ensure more accurate planning.
Further, the addition of the new Resource Manager option – which can be added to any Paragon transport planning system – extends Paragon from routing and scheduling solutions through to transport management capability. “It offers a convenient facility for storing and managing information regarding forward driver shift patterns and vehicle availability,” says Salter, “and integrates this with Paragon’s transport planning and optimisation process.”
“As a result, schedules can be created that match specific driver shifts and vehicles available on the day and historical performance can be monitored, for example in relation to the Working Time Directive regulations.”
Integration and Operability
Paragon 5.0 can be used in conjunction with Route Execution, a Paragon software solution that enables real-time vehicle activity to be tracked automatically against the planned routes and schedules, making use of standard interfaces with a number of leading vehicle tracking systems. And, following a recent distribution agreement, Paragon can also be provided with the Navman Wireless vehicle tracking system, turning a routing optimisation solution into a complete routing optimisation, transport management and execution system.
“At Paragon, we stay at the forefront of product development by ploughing back fully one-third of annual revenues into R&D and listening to our customers’ needs,” confirms Salter. “Paragon 5.0 builds on our proven technology established over 25 years and as previously, the new developments are applicable to small fleets of 10 and more vehicles based at a single depot to hundreds of vehicles running out of multiple sites.”
