Last Mile Route Planning for Parcel Distribution
Last Mile Route Planning as a hosted web service
Route Planning for parcel distribution with Rapidis Logistics Planner is available as a cloud hosted web service that can be integrated with most administrative systems like ERP-Systems, Workfore Manangement Systems and Asset Management Systems.
The Route Planning service works fast and will create optimized routes for larger fleets within minutes.
Output is optimized routes where all tasks are assigned to vehicles together with an optimized sequence for each vehicle. This both the number of vehicles and total drive time and distance are minimized for the fleet.
Restrictions and constraints
Rapidis Logistics Planner is very configurable making it possible to meet most restrictions and constraints related to both delivery tasks and the complete routes. Examples are advanced use of time windows and required qualifications related to individual tasks.
Most professionals working with last mile route optimization for parcel distribution will attempt to have their resources do as many deliveries per vehicle per day as possible.
Obviously they will prefer to assign stops close to each other to the same vehicle. Many organizations have created a network of districts making it easy to decide to which route or vehicle a delivery should be assigned.
Both methods have a number of built-in challenges that makes it almost impossible to create exactly the routes that will efficiently utilize a fleet of vehicles and maximize the number of deliveries they can manage to do.
The planner who should decide which deliveries are close enough to each other to be assigned to the same vehicles needs geographic insight at a very high level. The planning job tends to be even more complicated when vehicle capacities and work time are limiting factors and individual time windows for deliveries will make it increasingly harder to optimize last mile delivery without using dedicated route planning software.
Avoid Districts for Last Mile Route Planning
Dividing a large area in to districts based on postal codes, may work for many organizations, but will not optimize daily operations. Accepting the fact that the best overall plan for a fleet of vehicles doing last mile deliveries is very much related to minimizing the drive time that vehicles spend driving from one delivery to the next it is easy to comprehend that 2 deliveries close to each other, but in 2 separate districts most likely would occur in less drive time if assigned to the same route.
Thousands of drive time calculations
When the route planning software Logistics Planner is
about to create an optimal plan for the delivery of, for example, 200 parcels using 4 vehicles the first step is to produce what is known as the OD (Origin Destination) Cost Matrix which means calculating the drive time from all 200 delivery addresses to the other 199 delivery addresses; 40.000 route plans with drive time that is. With this matrix the route planning solver can calculate total drive time for the deliveries no matter how the 200 parcels are assigned to the fleet of 4 vehicles. If we are about to visit 1.000 locations for parcel delivery the number of drive time calculations rises to 1.000.000.
The initial plan and how to improve it
Next step in optimizing last mile delivery for a fleet of vehicles is to create the initial plan that simply assigns tasks or parcels to the vehicles making sure that all restrictions and constraints are respected. For this initial plan the total costs are calculated as the total sum of drive time minutes and the cost of starting the necessary number of vehicles. Hereafter the software runs a number
of improvement steps. By moving tasks between vehicles and changing sequences billions of possible combinations are investigated in order to find the plan for the fleet that results in the lowest possible total costs. The improvement steps will often reduce total drive time for a fleet of delivery vans with 25 – 30 % – even when the fleet is as small as 4 vehicles. I addition to drive time and the number of vehicles Logistics Planner will also minimize idle time that may occur from arriving to a location prior to earliest time allowed for unloading.
Transportation of goods has many faces
Logistics Planner handles several specialties within parcel distribution an last mile optimization. One is distribution from a central warehouse facility, but the optimization software also handles scenarios where each vehicle has both pickups and deliveries along the route. Another scenario are with Online Supermarkets who need the option to optimize their last mile deliveries so every costumer gets his delivery within the exact hour decided by the costumer when placing his order.