

TITRE : Finding the Right Distance

CONFÉRENCIER : Mikael Rönnqvist, The Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Norway

DATE et ENDROIT : 30 mars, 10h30, salle 6516, Pavillon André-Aisenstadt, Campus de l’Université de Montréal

RESPONSABLE : Jean-François Cordeau (514-343-7307)

RÉSUMÉ : The Swedish National Road database (NVDB) contains digital information of all Swedish roads: the state road network, the municipal road and street network, and private road networks. All roads, approximately over 500,000 km, are described geometrically, topologically, and with detailed information about each road segment. For transportation on forest roads there are also special details about accessibility, special forest roads, preferred routes in cities, turning radius, barriers etc. When forest companies and transporters agree on the transportation cost it is generally expressed as a function of the distance. Today there exist many road databases with detailed information of the underlying network defined through sets of arcs and nodes. Here, the distance between any pair of two points can be computed by solving a shortest path in the network. In most cases the objective can be chosen as the shortest distance or the shortest time. However, in the forest industry the computed distance should represent the route actually driven and this depends on many attributes. We describe an approach to find a set of optimal weights of the attributes such that the set of weights will provide routes that are the ones actually driven. An important part is a set of detailed « Key routes » where the forest companies and transporters have agreed on the best route between a set of start and end nodes. Within the project more than 500 such routes have been collected. We describe the result and analysis on finding the best possible weights. The results also include an analysis of how well it describes the more than two million invoiced routes.