GPS RoadBuilder
Customising the OPSI Road Network using GPS Data
To provide advanced scheduling and routing, OPSI's suite of products include comprehensive road network data.
However, specifically in rural areas where the availability of road data is a real issue, certain roads may not be part of this standard network. In which case, during its analysis, the FLO scheduling engine simply assumes a straight line distance from the closest road network point.
It is clear that a network containing pre-defined roads associated with frequently used routes will provide FLO with more accurate distances and travel times, resulting in a more accurate and optimized schedule.
Previously, customers were forced to manually add road network points corresponding to roads that didn't exist in the standard OPSI road network, thereby slowly building a road network customised to their frequently used routes.
Now, through integration with the GPS functionality within FLO, the new OPSI GPS RoadBuilder provides the ability to quickly and easily add roads (defined by GPS tracking data) to the existing road network.
Through an intuitive map-based interface, the user is able to easily identify routes that do not correspond to the underlying road network. The user can select the pertinant segment of GPS data and add it to the FLO road network.
However, the number of road network points is directly related to the optimization time and complexity, the more road segments, the longer FLO will take to find an optimized schedule. To avoid the accidental addition of unnecessary road network points, the GPS RoadBuilder will “clean” the selected data by removing redundant data points. For instance, a vehicle travelling up and down a particular road on multiple trips may produce many points lying along a straight-line road segment. Similarly, duplicate GPS points within a small, user-defined radius will be discarded, for example, those collected by a vehicle moving within a depot location. Consequently, only the start and end points of a segment are added to the road network, reducing the number of additional network points and thereby minimising the optimization time.
The result is a more accurate, easily customised road network producing better schedules and more accurate costs.
