Results
Effekt has produced five integrated prototype versions for construction and revision of carrier routed in newspaper and media product distribution. Results have already been Industrialized and commercially disseminated via the web solution of Distribution Innovation AS. It has lead to considerable improvement of the quality of carrier routes and a drastic reduction of the time and effort needed for route planning. The solution covers 80% of the Norwegian market and there are users also in Finland and Sweden. We have organized two industry seminars, published scientific results in international conferences and prestigious journals, and arranged scientific workshops and symposia.

The Effekt results have enhanced the basic DI Solution for distribution of media products to include highly user-friendly and easily accessible functions for automated construction and revision of optimized distribution routes. Due to the very high requirements for accurate and detailed road data that are currently not met by GIS we have added functions for user editing of road topology data. The Effekt VRP Solver Prototype is based on Spider, a component for efficient resolution of a wide variety of Vehicle Routing Problems, developed by SINTEF. New, tailor-made optimization methods have been developed and integrated that also consider route balancing and "visual beauty" constraints. In an initial step, the point based demand is aggregated on the basis of the underlying road topology to reduce the problem size. The resulting problem is a Node, Edge, and Arc Routing Problem (NEARP) with side constraints.

Effekt Publications
You find a list here.

Effekt Results
You find the final results report in Norwegian here.

Published November 11, 2005