Create more accurate transportation plans & feasible routes to ensure customer delivery schedules
Paragon is encouraging transportation planning teams to get more out of their plans by using mapping technology that incorporates Street-Level Mapping, Average Road Speed Data, and Truck Attribute Data. These additional modules to Paragon’s award winning routing and scheduling solutions add precision to transportation plans based on real-world data, creating a truer reflection of actual driver journeys that are much more realistic and achievable.
“When using transportation planning software, managers want to get as close to reality as possible,” said William Salter, CEO, Paragon Software Systems. “These modules make the plans more accurate so that the slack often included within the plan goes from an average of 15 percent to zero, meaning that you can give your customers much more accurate delivery times at lower costs.”
Street Level Mapping provides for enhanced dense drop delivery performance, more efficient urban routing and more accurate planning. It is ideal for dense urban transport operations, such as those found in home delivery, and improves routing and optimizes delivery schedules by offering:
• Direction of Travel (One-Way)
• Turn Restrictions (No Left, Right or U-Turn)
• Full Street Level Coverage
• Street Level Routing Functionality
• Address-Range Geocoding
Average Road Speed Data provides a calculated average speed in each direction on all road links for which there is sufficient speed data derived from an exhaustive analysis of billions of road speed observations. It is calculated using historic traffic flow velocities captured from a mix of vehicle types, providing better estimates of journey times for the roads where the average speed information is available. Average road speed data improves the precision of routing and scheduling with a truer reflection of the real travel times. It produces routes that are more realistic, achievable and acceptable to drivers while delivering greater customer service with more accurate delivery times. Average road speed data offers consistent journey estimates for more accurate routes and helps users to fine-tune their transport plans.
Truck Attribute Data helps prevent detours and reduces mileage. It streamlines the creation of cost effective, feasible transport plans that avoid truck restrictions by:
- Featuring physical height, weight, width and length (HWWL) information for primary, main and some secondary road networks
- Including similar non-physical restrictions that apply 24/7 such as travelling at certain hours only within a residential section
- Enabling the automatic calculation of transport plans that avoid, for example, low bridges when using high vehicles
Tests conducted using these modules found that the number of vehicles could be reduced to make the same number of deliveries; driver shifts per day decreased by 5 percent; and hours on duty could be reduced by 5 percent. “By lowering mileage and providing more accurate plans, drivers found that the transport plans created with these modules were much more achievable, and allowed them to meet their customer service goals,” adds Salter.
