1.0.5 - Advanced Routing Engine with Intelligent Route Optimization

Advanced Routing Engine with Intelligent Route Optimization

This release focuses on improving the stability and reliability of the routing engine during route modifications. Several issues were resolved that could cause inconsistent routing results or the unintended removal of trips and riders when making updates to existing routes. With these fixes in place, route changes are now handled more predictably, ensuring that trips and riders remain assigned as expected while preserving overall route integrity.

Advanced Routing Engine

This newest routing upgrade is powered by an industry-proven optimization algorithm used across various industries to optimize vehicle fleet utilization. We are using it to solve this problem for our customers - given all the trips, find the best route that maximizes trips served, minimizes miles driven, and minimizes vehicles used.

Overview

• It takes a high-level view of routing, evaluating hundreds to thousands of potential routes to find the most optimal one that serves as many trips as possible. The previous routing engine handled trips one-by-one, which could result in unexpectedly unservable trips and inefficient routes.
• When vehicle resources are constrained, the engine can strategically drop specific harder or longer trips in order to serve a greater number of other trips.
• Route miles and vehicle usage are actively optimized within the routing solution, resulting in better vehicle utilization, fewer total miles driven, less deadhead, and more shared miles between passengers.
• When it makes sense, the engine can instruct drivers to arrive early and wait at stops, as an alternative to inefficient movement between stops in a zigzag pattern.
• Given sufficient time, the engine always arrives at an optimal solution and will confirm this internally. Time limits are configured to adapt to our customers' use cases and can be adjusted as needed. For route adjustments, the existing route is provided as a starting point to accelerate the solution.
• This new routing mode is compatible with pre-existing routing settings found on the Organization Settings page in SHARE Admin, with the exception of manual routing and location-optimized routing.
• "Add Request to Route" in this mode will succeed if it manages to add at least one new trip without disturbing existing ones. Previously, "Add Request to Route" was all-or-nothing.

We've received feedback about prioritizing first-come-first-served when vehicle capacity is limited, optimizing for shared miles, prioritizing ADA passengers, and more. While those aren't available yet, this new routing engine is the foundation for adapting routing to our customers' specific needs.

Optimal Organization Settings

This engine is best suited for organizations that:

• Require trip bookings to be made at least 30 minutes in advance
• Route riders to or from specific points of interest (locations) as pickup or drop-off points
• Have Request Buffer Time (Early) of X minutes set in in their organization settings
  • This setting allows the routing engine to schedule a rider's pickup or arrival up to X minutes earlier than their requested time
  • For example, a rider requesting a 10:50 AM pickup may be scheduled as early as 10:40 AM - this flexibility gives the engine more room to group riders together and build more efficient routes

Organizations that have Manual or Location-Optimized routing enabled in their organization settings will not see any benefit from this new engine.

Availability for Existing Organizations

The Advanced Routing Engine is not automatically enabled for existing organizations - it will be introduced carefully to avoid any disruption to active services. If your organization fits the above, reach out to learn more about enabling the Advanced Routing Engine and how we can enable it for your organization.

Also Resolved In This Release

• Fixed a distance calculation bug affecting organizations routing across state lines
• Fixed an issue preventing Google Maps navigation (Driver Application) on routes with more than 25 waypoints
• Fixed a bug causing rider QR codes in boarding passes and text messages to occasionally display the wrong rider's code (previously printed boarding passes should be reprinted)
• Fixed a bug causing the Route Path report to not display all recorded vehicle locations

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