Transportation route optimization with cost object in China.

As to large-scale logistics transportations, road transport plays the primary role and route planning is often used to find the shortest path to save cost. However beside fuel consumption, many other costs on the road, such as tolls contribute a lot to the road transport cost, so cutting down the total cost while maintaining efficiency is very important for logistic businesses in many cases where the shortest path may be not the really optimal route. Based on Geographic Information System, one of the key technologies of intelligent traffic system, such as Google Maps, this paper presents a transportation optimization framework which integrates the cost computation including tolls into route planning with time constraints. It can reduce the total cost for long distance shipment and intra-city short distance freight as well while still satisfying the time constraints, which is very crucial for areas with many toll gates with diverse toll policies in China. The experiment verifies usability and validity of the present tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]