April/May 2008

German routing and scheduling specialist PTV claims that the new version 5.9 of its Intertour system solves what it calls 'extremely difficult planning processes' such as narrow delivery time slots, vehicles at different locations at the beginning of the vehicle scheduling process, and open route structures.

Its new planning engine, code-named MEFISTO (for Meta Heuristic Framework for Optimisation) has been developed in cooperation with the University of Karlsruhe, and aims to allow additional optimisation methods for specific planning tasks to be integrated into the process.

As a result, PTV claims that Intertour 5.9 is the world's first commercial vehicle routing and scheduling system to use the state-of-the-art granular tabu search method for post-optimisation. This allows planners optimise the route schedule generated by Intertour's standard scheduling system, selectively fine-tuning the results.

The current planning status, the optimisation effect and the corresponding trip costs are displayed on the screen during the entire post-optimisation process.

There is also new functionality to allow the despatcher to reduce the proportion of empty runs between trips in multi-modal transport.