Spider offers a huge potential for savings in transportation through optimized planning. Tasks include strategic, tactical and operational planning, such as transportation network design, fleet dimensioning, dynamic fleet management, and dynamic cheapest path calculations.
Good co-ordination of transportation activities can improve customer service, improve resource utilization and give environmental and economical savings. Spider is a versatile and robust software product that easily extends to meet special requirements, making it an ideal tool as a planning kernel for real-world application development.
Spider is developed in close collaboration with industrial users over many years. It is owned by SINTEF Digital. Spider is integrated in the web solution of Distribution Innovation AS (DI) for last-mile distribution, and DI's Plan & Go solution for dynamic transportation planning. For customers with special requirements, we develop high quality, tailor-made solutions in a cost-effective way.
The algorithms used for optimal planning in Spider are based on state-of-the-art approximation methods - so-called metaheuristics - for the solution of Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP), and efficient optimization methods for the Dynamic Shortest Path Problem (SPP). The VRP is about how to best assign transportation requests to each of the available vehicles, and for each vehicle, what is the best sequence of customer visits. The goal is to find the best transportation plan according to revenues and economical and environmental transportation costs. The plan must obey constraints, such as vehicle capacity and opening hours at the customers.