Optimizing the Process of Handling Road Network Data

Sammanfattning: Route optimization for different types of land-based vehicles is the process of finding the most efficient route. To achieve this, all necessary calculations throughout the process require road network data of the relevant surroundings. In order to prevent erroneous calculations and results, it is crucial that the data is correctly prepared and adapted for the algorithms and systems performing the route optimization. The company B&M Systemutveckling is active in this area and their process of handling road network data is troublesome in certain factors. This may harm the possibility to make further progress in some fields. In order to improve the process, this thesis analyses three problematic factors which are time consumption, correctness and the required attention from the user. This was done by analysing all parts of the process and acknowledging if and how these factors could be improved. With the results of the analyse in mind, a new improved system was designed. The main focus was to improve these three main factors that are considered especially problematic in the process. A prototype was then built from this design which turned out to be a powerful upgrade of the currently used process, making improvements in all of the main problematic factors. The time consumption decreased from at least one week to one hour. The attention required from the user decreased immensely resulting in a decreased risk for human errors. Utilization of more suitable data structures and algorithms combined with the decreased risk for human errors had a beneficial impact on the correctness.