Intelligent routing and scheduling

Thanks to the unstoppable rise of ecommerce, the ability to ensure direct, fast, accurate, cost-effective delivery to consumer and business addresses has become a key requirement for logistics providers and their partners. The plotting and execution of routes to meet both demanding schedules and emissions targets is thus increasingly reliant on sophisticated software planning systems. EPG’s launch of Greenplan into the Americas forms an important ingredient of the company’s investment plan. Already making big waves in Europe, Greenplan comes to the American market laden with global awards, including first prize in the Amazon Last Mile Challenge, finishing significantly ahead of runner-up MIT in a field comprising 220 participants from 22 countries. 

With Greenplan, companies are already realizing sustainable and efficient route and tour planning. Customers are saving miles, vehicles and tours using the intelligent algorithm and have achieved efficiency gains of up to 20% compared to their previous route planning solution. Following the dynamic planning model, the algorithm considers the traffic flow speeds at different times of the day, including the actual conditions in the delivery area. If these factors are not considered, this often leads to poor route planning - and as a result, frustrated drivers waste valuable time in traffic jams or devliveries are late. The Greenplan algorithm considers historical data on traffic density, time-of-day traffic flow speeds and supplementary factors such as vehicle size for individual route sections. This mapping of actual journey times enables precise arrival times against time windows, thus significantly increases the reliability of the planning. On average, customers report adherence to the agreed delivery time (ETA) of over 97%. 

Unique concept: route planning with overlapping districts 

In addition to the possibility of planning routes fully dynamically, Greenplan offers another unique concept: the algorithm uses planning with overlapping districts - the optimal combination of planning in fixed delivery districts and fully dynamic planning. This concept dissolves the fixed routes that arise, for example, from fixed delivery districts (e.g. postcode areas). This means that the delivery areas overlap at their borders by a choosen percentage. This means that drivers, if this is more efficient for the tour as a whole, can also drive to addresses that actually belong to the delivery area of another employee. . The decisive advantage: more than 80% of the known addresses are still approached, which significantly reduces handling times. Compared to planning with fixed delivery areas, the delivery vehicles are optimally utilised through the peripheral areas and the total duration of all routes is reduced. As a result, this saves costs and vehicles - and leads to fewer CO2 emissions as well as less stress for the drivers. Overlapping districts improves driver and customer affinity.