Multiple Pickup and Delivery Planning Solution

Multiple Pickup and Delivery Planning (MPDP) is very common in both passenger and cargo transport operations. However, due to the planning complexity, it is impossible to quickly generate good solutions manually to support daily transport operation planning. The MPDP solution developed by the team is able to close the gap by quickly generating transport plans for multiple vehicles with multiple pickup locations and multiple delivery locations.

• Web-based application. No installation required and easy to access
• Capable of handling multiple complex constraints, such as different time windows, different vehicle types, different vehicle departure times, different vehicle start and end locations,
• Visualisation of jobs and planned routes on both map and Gantt chart
• Flexible for human planner to overwrite the existing plan with drag-and-drop feature

The MPDP solution can be applied to two potential areas. The first area is passenger transport planning for Book-a-Ride, bus pooling and carpooling services. The MPDP solution is able to quickly generate high quality plans either in advance or in real-time to replace the manual planning. The second area is cargo delivery planning in the logistics industry. The potential users include packed food delivery to consumers from different restaurants, courier service providers who provide same day pickup and delivery services, premier transport service providers who provide 2-hour delivery services etc.

The solution will facilitate the human planner to assign travel routes based on the vehicle’s current location, vehicle capacity, service requestor’s start and end location as well as service start time. The solution will also consider the drivers break time, vehicle departure location and end location. Moreover, the planning and scheduling engine developed is able to run in the background to assign passengers to vehicles automatically. This feature can also be used for the real-time planning of last minute transport service requests.

The solution can be applied for both passenger service providers and logistics industry players for delivery planning.

Potential users includes of Dial a Ride (DAR) service providers and logistics opterators that provide same day pickup and delivery courier services. 

• Provide better service to customers
• Reduce operating cost by cutting vehicle traveling distance on the road
• Improve vehicle utilisation to generate more revenue