MIDAS's routing and scheduling approach for the Australian transport industries

Abstract

Effective and efficient route scheduling can mainly affect client/customer satisfaction and operating costs in the transport industry. Dynamic scheduling has simplified transport logistics such as courier services by providing technology-enhanced, real-time communication. Service requests from the same area should be served once rather than multiple times, facilitating a huge saving in travel distance and time. Mobile Intelligent Distributed Application Software (MIDAS) develops an autonomous routing and scheduling system for Australian transport industry. This system enables smoother running of transportation logistics with efficient and effective operation costs, by combining wireless and Internet technology. This system can receive orders and requests from mobile devices (Palm) and the Internet, and then schedule and forward the orders to the drivers automatically. Autonomous route scheduling includes static and dynamic scheduling to produce an optimal route on digital maps. Static scheduling is used to deal with non-emergency orders that can be scheduled overnight, to output a better solution with sufficient computation time. Dynamic scheduling can also be used to deal with emergency orders that require real-time scheduling within limited time constraints. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.