Optimise your delivery fleet using HERE Technologies tools

With increasing pressure on New Zealand’s domestic supply chains, there’s a need to minimise costs whilst meeting high consumer demand. This is a geospatial challenge which can be solved using a few very smart location data products from HERE Technologies.

This article will present three digital solutions to help those in the logistics industry increase asset utilisation, lower operational costs, meet delivery windows, and make it easier for drivers to do their jobs.

As a HERE Technologies partner, Abley can help you with your projects, onboard you onto HERE systems and support you right up to releasing and managing your solutions.

HERE’s truck routing service provides optimised routes for a single vehicle. You provide the profile of your truck and receive a route calculated that is legally and physically allowed.

The strength comes from its flexibility in truck profile. You can submit a truck’s dimension, weight, axle count, trailer count, HAZMAT restriction, speed cap, departure, or arrival window and much more. The routing service will consider these parameters alongside real-time and historic traffic conditions to provide a suitable route for the driver.

HERE truck routing

HERE’s waypoint sequencing solution allows you to determine the optimal order for a vehicle to visit each stop on a series of deliveries. This solves the travelling salesman problem for a sequence of up to 120 waypoints (or stops).

The solution can optimise the delivery route for distance, driving time (using real-time and historic traffic conditions) or commercial value. The routes will follow all legal and physical restrictions (as per the trucking routing solution). The output is a list of waypoints which can be navigated to in sequence.

This solution optimises the sequence of stops for a single vehicle, but what about your entire fleet? Read on to understand the tour planning solution.

HERE Waypoint sequencing

Map reference

HERE’s high performance tour planning solution optimises routes for the whole fleet. You provide information about your vehicle fleet (vehicle types, capacity, running costs and more) and your jobs (location, time windows, priority and more) and the solution will create optimised routes across the vehicles and jobs.

This solves the capacitive vehicle routing problem with optional time windows for each delivery. This is essentially the travelling salesman with capacity across multiple vehicles considered.

This solution optimises both the number of vehicles needed to complete your deliveries and the sequence of delivers for each vehicle. Advanced options can be utilised, including delivery time windows, multiple depots, drivers returning home and multiple types of vehicles (gas mileage, refrigeration and more). For example, your fleet can include a passenger vehicle and specialised refrigeration trucks in one route.

HERE trucks

These three supply chain solutions give logistics companies access to accurate real-time data and tools to:

  1. Meet delivery time windows
  2. Calculate ETAs to meet delivery time windows and drive hours of service requirement
  3. Increase asset utilisation by optimising driver routes and sequences
  4. Lower operational costs
  5. Make it easer for drivers to do their jobs
  6. Improved safety

By collecting data from over 100,000 sources and with 80 billion API calls per month, HERE provides an accurate digital representation of the world and a wide range of tools and location data products to meet your needs.

Our experienced team can manage installation, administration, security, and notifications. Additionally, we can customise products to help your business gain more insights from your data and ensure a strong return on your investment.

We welcome you to contact Jacob Pescini for a demo or for an evaluation licence.