1 Common planning use cases

The following sections detail some common practical use cases for ODL Live.

1.1 NEMT/NEPT, paratransit, community transport, taxis

• Supports automated intelligent dispatch for taxis, on-demand buses, airport shuttles and non-emergency patient transport.

• Tailored for NEMT/NEPT/paratransit:

  • Minimise driver/vehicle/fuel costs
  • Optimise multiple routes together
  • Soft/hard limits on pickup + dropoff times
  • Soft/hard limits for max transit time
  • Soft/hard limits on stationary waiting time
  • Delays pickups to reduce transit time (delay optimisation)
  • Multiple seating configurations (e.g. wheelchairs/stretchers)
  • Model reduced pick/drop time with driver’s helper
  • Preferred drivers for passengers

• Seamlessly schedule ASAP and pre-booked jobs together.

• Model multiple rideshare constraints - e.g. max passengers, max simultaneous jobs, max on-board time, earliest/latest pickup and dropoff.

• Set separate time windows for pickup and delivery or model as ASAP.

1.2 Field service management

Intelligent mobile workforce scheduling and dispatching for technicians, engineers, surveyors, cleaners, repair persons, road-side assist / car breakdown services, tradespeople etc.

• Optimised assignment of emergency, same day or future jobs for field force management. Model trade-off between serving jobs on same day or delaying to group with nearby jobs on later days.

• Model complex work rules such as work breaks, preferred staff-job assignments, job priorities, job duration functions based on skill level, different permitted servicing and driving hours, service radius / geofences limits and more.

• Offer your customers route-efficient appointment times. Accurate calculation of available service slots based on existing jobs and current route plans.

• Save driving time and increase customer satisfaction.

1.3 Freight planning

Realtime control for last mile freight deliveries, pallet networks etc.

• Offer customers efficient collection or delivery time slots, by querying the optimiser for the ‘X best slots’, during the booking process.

• Reoptimise around already loaded items, when a truck is still being loaded at the depot and new deliveries come in.

• Automated same day collection optimisation. Add new collections on-the-fly to trucks already on the road making collections and deliveries. If a vehicle is running late, its pending collections are automatically shifted to nearby vehicles, minimising the total late-running across your fleet.

• Reorder on-board deliveries, for example if a truck is running late and a delivery needs to be brought forward to make its time window.

• Optimise large problems with thousands of jobs using our intelligent search technology, based on our proprietary fuzzy problem splitting algorithm.

• Optimise multi-day schedules with drivers ‘tramping’, spending nights away from base.

• Choose delivery paths across a network (e.g. choose depot).

1.4 Home deliveries route planning

• Optimised same day or next day home deliveries.

• Optimises around rush hours; close-together stops automatically served in rush hours, greater drive distances outside of rush hours.

• Multiple route design options, to keep drivers in geographically compact areas or their local ‘patch’.

• Single or multi-depot.

• Time slot generation.

  • Offer only delivery slots you can serve with your available fleet. Never exceed your delivery capacity.

  • Generate optimised delivery time slots on-the-fly as your customer is placing their order on your website. Offer your customer delivery times slots that work for your fleet.

1.5 On-demand deliveries

Plan same day deliveries, e.g. one or two hour deliveries, courier services.

• Schedule any kind of on-demand delivery, food deliveries and more - takeout, restaurant deliveries, groceries, drinks, shopping.

• Automated dispatching, order stacking and on-board time constraints.

• Offer customers dynamic timeslots or SLAs based on available vehicle resource.