Current optimization-based journey planners for road travel and public transport have become indispensable tools for modern enterprises and citizens. They contribute to more efficient travel and better use of infrastructure. However, they neither react to deviations in an adequate way, nor consider all relevant ways of travel from door to door.
An increasing number of organizations utilize optimization-based software tools for vehicle routing, with substantial improvements. Such tools optimize the use of a fleet of vehicles to serve customer requests in the best way possible. They automatically generate a plan that specifies the best sequence of requests for each vehicle. Vehicle routing tools of today are lacking capabilities for handling dynamic changes, have virtually no functions for reactive maintenance of the vehicle routing plan when changes occur, and they are primarily used by large organizations.
In the DynamITe competence project, our main goal was to develop the knowledge, methods and software needed as the basis for a novel transport planning technology that is able to utilize real-time information. The vision was a user-friendly ITS technology for planning, available to virtually anyone, that is based on a "live", up-to-date representation of the current situation, and with updated prognoses. The results from DynamITe moved the state of the art in the field, and constitute a basis for needed innovations in dynamic transport planning technology that will enable novel transport services, lead to more efficient use of infrastructure, encourage increased use of public transport, and reduce costs and environmental damage for society.
DynamITe was funded by the Research Council of Norway, NPRA, DI, and Ruter. The project owner was SINTEF, with the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA), Distribution Innovation AS (DI), ITS Norway, and NTNU as the initial partners. NTNU hosted the DynamITe PhD. Ruter AS, the public transport company in greater Oslo, joined the DynamITe consortium 2018, their goal being to provide Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS), where Ruter takes care of the whole journey, with accompanying journey planning tools that handle dynamics and all relevant travel modes, including city-bikes and flexible mini-buses that transport travelers between their doorstep and public transport.
DI and SINTEF developed methods and software for a web-based, service for dynamic vehicle routing. Prototypes based on improvements of SINTEF's VRP Solver Spider have been tested by DI on real cases with good results, primarily on last mile delivery of goods from Internet-shopping to households. SINTEF is developing a new version of Spider targeted at dynamic vehicle routing, primarily as a research prototype, but with a next generation industrial vehicle routing solver aimed at a wide range of applications as the goal.
The work on methods for journey planning built on SINTEF's journey planner Dynamo and results from the recently finished EU project BonVoyage. These results were taken further, as Ruter and SINTEF started developing methods and prototype tools for dynamic MaaS journey planning. SINTEF delivered a journey planning demonstrator based on Dynamo to Ruter. It supported use of city bikes, private bikes, walking, public transport and car.
DynamITe collaborated with Aarhus University and the University of Braunschweig on research regarding carbon emission effects of transport. Results show that consolidation of freight, and information exchange between freight forwarders, both may give large savings.
DynamITe produced 12 published journal papers, 23 published conference papers and several scientific talks.