Duration: 1989 – 1993

This 10 million ECU project was assigned by the EEC within the ESPRIT programme to a consortium of firms from different European countries. The project objective was to develop a knowledge Based System for solving complex vehicle routing and scheduling problems in different transport domains. The key idea on which the PONTIFEX approach rely on is the combined use of Artificial Intelligent methods and OR technics for solving the real world fleet management problems.
The system provides capabilities for mapping the knowledge of the human experts, storing the existing routing and scheduling algorithms, and modelling the real world problem constraints, conditions and parameters. Through an Artificial Intelligence based computer package, the system is able to select the appropriate algorithm to use, and to interact with the appropriate data bases in order to come up with the resulting patterns.
Of the major goals of the project was to create a system that will be comprehensive but also simple and user friendly so that it can be used by the non-experts in OR techniques. The project was attempted to the modelling of RSP for all transport domains but its first and primary formulation is for air transport (i.e. for routing and scheduling a fleet of aircrafts), and for road freight vehicles (distribution and fleet management). Future extensions will concern bus transport.

Role of TREDIT:
– Development of Routing and Scheduling algorithms for Road Freight Domain
– Analysis Road Freight Transport operations
– Modelling of physical distribution real world problem
– Fleet management: user requirements analysis