As standard, Road XS comes pre-installed with route optimisation and our Smart Route technology. This ensures that whenever you create a journey, add or remove passengers and allocate drivers, route optimisation kicks in and the optimised route is immediately shown to you on a map automatically.
What is Route Optimisation?
An optimised route is one which shows the best path based on current known variables to the destination. An optimised route will save you fuel and time and is also good for the environment in reducing your carbon footprint. Find out more about how we can help you achieve the Green Mark here.
In an ideal world, you would always take this optimised route, but as you know, community transport services operate in environments far from ideals!
For this reason, we have been working hard at Road XS to deliver a different form of optimisation. An optimised manual route (we are yet to come up with an affectionate name for it). This new upgrade allows you to manually override the optimised default, enabling you to pick up a passenger who might be better suited to be picked up before others or in a different combination. The easy to use drag and drop interface means you will have no difficulty in re-organising the trip whether it’s for a community car scheme, dial a ride or group booking. Route optimisation will kick in from the variables which you set, giving you greater freedom in Road XS than ever before to plot your desired routes.
This route optimisation update provides great flexibility with your route planning and gives you greater control. We’ve even built access controls around the route optimisation manual override enabling only specific users to perform the override. This means if any volunteers are uncomfortable with the manual override it simply won’t show for them and a more skilled user can plot the route.
Manual Route Optimisation in Practice
Let’s imagine you have 5 passengers to pick up in a minibus. You add the five passengers into Road XS but then realise you would like to pick up the furthest away passenger first, not last. All you do with this update is drag them to the top of the journey line, press save, and the rest of the pickups along the route will be optimised accordingly (even with estimated arrival times).
In another example, you might wish to handle two passengers first who require longer to load into the vehicle. All you would do is drag and drop them into the new slot and away you go! Route XS makes your route planning and route optimisation easy whether you take the automated route built in or your custom modification.
With recurring journeys, you can also re-plot your route even if the main group recurring journey was created in the past, Road XS will automatically provide you the option to apply the manual route optimisation to future journeys or just the one you are working on.
To find out more about what else launched with this update, simply visit What’s New. If you have any questions or would like to know more, then please contact us, or visit our Road XS Community.
