Most transportation departments strive to improve their performance with process and technology investments. Pathalyst provides the missing piece of this puzzle by delivering optimized route designs. The Pathalyst approach works in concert with your existing processes and technology, enabling dramatic improvements in resource utilization without disruption to your transportation operation. Since fees are based only on implemented results, there is no risk for the district.

In the early 1980s, software vendors began delivering automated routing products for K-12 school transportation. Although these early products often delivered significant savings compared with the manual routing process, their focus soon gravitated toward the information management aspects of student transportation. As these products evolved, the vendors delivered sophisticated solutions for managing student transportation information and delivering the information to an extend audience beyond the transportation department.

Today, none of these vendors focuses on algorithms to develop route designs with high efficiency resource utilization. Their optimization products typically divide the transportation demand into many small systems with independent solutions. Often runs are automatically created for individual schools. After developing runs for each school separately, these runs are then couple together to form routes by a separate algorithm. The resulting route design has built-in inefficiencies related to this multi-step approach.

A constant difficulty implementing routes developed by traditional routing products is that the routes are simply infeasible. Since the total route is built in parts, the individual parts often will not couple to create feasible routes. When this occurs, the transportation planner is faced with either repeating the previous optimization step or making manual adjustments. Frustration often leads planners to revert to a manual process, dramatically reducing the value of the auto routing solution.

It is obvious that this multi-step approach is woefully inadequate generating highly efficient routes. The Pathalyst research team was charged with developing an appropriate routing algorithm that generated full path routes in a single step. The stop loads from all tiers including elementary, middle and high schools are processed simultaneously to develop complete routes. Investigating policy changes or bell time changes is simply performed by adjusting the routing rules and generating an alternate route design. The Pathalyst research team remains engaged continuously improving the routing algorithms.

The Pathalyst solution provides efficient route designs without manual intervention, reducing district routing effort and increasing resource utilization. The Pathalyst Turnkey Routing eliminates the inefficiencies and operational difficulties associated with other auto-routing systems. Since there is absolutely no risk, let Pathalyst save you time and money providing efficient routing dedigns for your school district.