Feb-March 2003

After a successful trial on three salt-spreading vehicles last winter, highway maintenance contractor Edmund Nuttall has rolled out the GeoRoute route optimisation and Wintranet performance management software for all its winter maintenance fleet.

GeoRoute has been developed by PSR (UK), whose Canadian parent specialises in route optimisation for highway maintenance operations. Its mapping and optimisation technology was first used by the Canadian postal service in planning and programming about 21,000 walking postal delivery routes.

Nuttall says benefits include improved presentation of detailed and accurate spreading routes for the vehicles, and full and verifiable records for individual routes and vehicles (the latter being provided through the Wintranet system).

Nuttall says it has now abandoned its laborious old manual system, which involved large sheets of paper and coloured pencils. Once the data has been included on the mapping system, it says, it not only provides optimum routes, but also helps with the production of presentations for tenders.

PSR says GeoRoute is particularly effective in this respect because it allows a wide variety of "what if" questions to be analysed and answered simply by adding data or moving parameters within the module.