Decision Support System for Indian Post

Decision Support System for Indian Post

Every regional office of India Post has many delivery routes called beats with each beat assigned to a particular postman/postwoman for the delivery of articles. The sequence in which the postman/postwoman walks down the beat starting from the post office point till he/she comes back delivering the articles have been decided manually so far and thus are not very optimal.

A system was required for the officials to visualize the walking sequence on map, get the beats’ sequence optimized and improve the overall productivity of the workers.

Client

The customer is Indian Postal Department. India Post is one of the well recognized, efficient organization in providing high quality mail, parcel and related services. The organization is directly run by the Government of India.

Challenge

Developing a sequencing algorithm that finds out an optimal delivery sequence within the beat limits was the most challenging task in the project.

Customizing an Open Source GIS to add custom labels with directional arrows and themes were the other challenges of the project.

Solution

We provided an open source desktop solution using QGIS and PostGIS. The application was developed using QT and C++ on both Windows and Linux. The following features were provided to the users in order to optimize and improve the overall productivity of the postman and postwoman:

1. View various beats and the walking sequence of them on a map.
2. View workload of a beat in hours which is based on articles and beat distance.
3. Generate detailed workload reports.
4. Let the system automatically optimize the beat sequence to reduce workload.
5. Manually sequence the beat if needed.
6. Edit beats (shuffle streets) to balance workload among the beats.

Benefits

After the implementation of the project, now the officials have a better view of the beats and their walking sequence through the help of a map and custom labels displayed on the sequence. They are now visually able to interpret the beats and edit wherever they find pitfalls in the existing beats. After optimizing the beats, the postmen/postwomen are given the new routes to be followed with the print out of the map with the walking sequence clearly demarcated.