VEHICLE ROUTING SOFTWARE WITH

GOOGLE APP ENGINE IMPLEMENTATION

My project Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) faces goods distribution problems needs necessary resources, money and technical

expertise, to purchase and implement complex planning softwares

Aim to build an easy-to-deploy/use/maintain software

that helps companies manage their sale orders and deliveries

focusing specifically on planning optimised distribution routes.

Use cases - Customer Mgmt

The system maintains a dynamic list of customers with their details, most importantly their delivery addresses.

Use case – Product Mgmt

The system maintains a dynamic list of materials with their details, especially delivery costs in terms of size units and/or weight units.

Use case – Order Mgmt

The system allows customers to place orders for products.

Orders can be one-off or recurring (daily, weekly or monthly).

Use case – Vehicle Mgmt

The system maintains a dynamic list of vehicles with their details, especially operating cost and vehicle capacity in terms size units and/or weight units.

Use case – Delivery Mgmt Delivery planning, which includes

vehicle routing, is done automatically on a daily basis.

Planning can also be done manually with modified variables and results are stored for review and analysis.

Use case – Inventory Mgmt The system maintains inventory counts

and carries out Material Requirement Planning (MRP) based on projected demands and sales orders.

Implementation

Google App Engine (GAE):Was first released as beta in April 2008.Is a platform for

○ developing and ○ hosting web applications○ in Google-managed data centres.

Is cloud computing technology○ It virtualizes applications across multiple

servers and data centres

Why is it good? Easy to scale from one to millions of users

without infrastructure headaches. Low cost – you can jumpstart your

application with zero cost Fast development – No assembly required –

fully-integrated development environment. Easy maintenance – no worry about

software updates or compatibility issues The pitch: You write the code, someone else

worries about everything else

What can it do?

Serve static files Serve dynamic requests Store data Call web services Authenticate with user’s Google account Send email Process images Use memcache

Any catch?

GAE is only free up to a certain limit (but it is large enough for comfortable use)

Stored Data – 1 GB Datastore API Calls – 141M calls daily Image Manipulation API Calls – 45M calls daily Mail API Calls – 2,000 emails daily Requests – 43M requests daily Bandwidth – 1GB daily CPU Time – 6.5 CPU-hours daily

Billing

Use as much as needed, whenever needed Pay only for what is used Like utility (power, water) No need to build own infrastructure Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) No need to install supporting softwares Platform as a service (PaaS)

Resource Unit Unit Cost

Bandwidth GB $0.10

CPU time CPU hour $0.10

Stored data GB/month $0.15

Recipients Emailed Recipient $0.0001

Datastore BigTable Distributed storage system for structured

data Petabytes of data across thousands of

commodity servers Designed to scale applications to a very

large size Used by many projects at Google: web

indexing, Google Earth, Google Finance,…

Datastore

Not a relational database Fully object oriented – data is stored as

entities which have properties (key/value pairs)

No join – use reference properties No aggregate queries – not even count All queries must run against an index and some other weird rules

More information

https://appengine.google.com