Today’s webinar on the CDC stockpile routing portal to TourSolver just finished. (There will be another one on April 2, 2008.) According to Kevin Callen, the moderator from C2Logix, there were 96 folks participating. I was preregistered. At the appointed time, I had to login to the website and then install the GoToWebinar viewer, which brought up a window on which I could see Kevin’s computer and a little window for asking questions. Also, I dialed into the conference call, on which I could hear Kevin explaining everything.
He gave an overview of the software, which finds a set of routes for trucks to deliver fixed quantities to PODs in the shortest possible time. A user has to register to get access to the software and then schedule a session (right now, only one person can use the CDC portal at a time, though that is supposed to change). During a session, a user can link files on his computer to the software, run the optimization, get the results, change the data, and run it again to consider different scenarios. The input data requires either street addresses or coordinates for the PODs and the RSS. Different trucks can have different quantities and start from different locations (it appears). The optimization cycle takes only a few minutes. The results include routes for each truck, maps, turn-by-turn directions, and the mileage chart between locations. All can be exported to Excel, Word, or text.
Kevin answered questions and explained things clearly. Altogether, a nice webinar about a very useful planning model.
