Benefits Of Route Optimization
Are you a small business just starting out, or a nation-wide carrier? Either way, your business can benefit from route optimization. Let’s take some time to define what this is, and how it can help your business run smarter, faster, and better.
What is Route Optimization?
Route optimization is simply the process by which the game plan of how to get from point A to point B is made more efficient and beneficial to all parties involved. Route planning involves taking into account available roads, speed limits, traffic, road conditions, freight, and time constraints to map out the best possible route to take.
What Are My Options for Route Optimization?
Route optimization can be carried out a number of ways. The simplest and most old-fashioned way is a driver and his map. Using a physical map to plan your route is a great skill to learn, and there’s no substitute for the skill of map reading.
A skilled driver can use his years of on-road experience to map out the best routes based on efficiency and road conditions and take into account his own levels or fatigue or vitality to determine how far he can or should drive.
AI as a Guide
Artificial Intelligence can also be used for route planning, in conjunction with app-based software. Machine learning is the process by which a computer program learns to solve problems, be efficient, plan, and answer questions based on available and new data. The more info a program has the faster and better it can make choices and propose a plan.
This AI can be an invaluable tool in helping your drivers maximize their time by mapping out the fastest route for them. AI can also quickly learn from changing circumstances and redirect drivers along the best new options should the need arise.
How Does All This Work?
All of this technology integrates through apps, software, hardware, and communications to streamline travel and help your company keep moving. A GPS app can integrate with software at Head Quarters, and give dispatch real-time info about driver location.
Alternately, the software can completely replace dispatch for complex route-planning and load allocation tasks. It can also be used to supplement your humis but, or take over loads if there’s too much work for your dispatch crew to handle in one shift. It really just depends on your staffing needs and what your business can handle.
Can I Use Multiple Systems?
You can definitely use multiple systems as you route optimize. Your route maker can be a combination of a human truck driver, a GPS system, and an AI computer program depending on your logistics needs and company size.
Route planning involves multiple factors and not all of this can be perfectly tracked by software continually. The software may know where the next exit is, but may not be able to see a traffic jam ahead. Or, the software may be aware of a traffic jam, but may not see the road is getting icy ahead.
How you use route optimization and which technology you choose to implement depends on what your company, drivers, and clients have the greatest need of. At the end of the day, it’s a combination of human and machine learning and experience that makes your business run.
