Dec 06/Jan 07

A system called StreetServicer from MapMechanics is said to make it more efficient for organisations with mobile staff to plan clusters of calls on the same street section, or to service each side of the street separately.

The new product targets activities such as road gritting, milk and newspaper deliveries, refuse collection and street cleaning.

Conventional vehicle routing and scheduling systems consider each call point separately before allocating them to a route, which means individual street segments will not necessarily always be treated as logical groups of calls.

StreetServicer gets round this by allocating calls to street segments on the basis of their complete address. The routes generated respect one-way streets and other traffic constraints contained within the user's chosen street dataset.

Users can also specify whether specific road segments need be serviced in only one pass, or each side of the road needs to be scheduled separately (ideal for wide roads or street cleaning applications).

StreetServicer has been written by MapMechanics as a module of GeoConcept, the digital mapping system supplied by the company. It also requires a street-level map data from supplier such as Ordnance Survey or Navteq (also available from MapMechanics).