ONE NAME — 'IWO SYSTEMS • Over the last month
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we have received many calls from your readers about the Autoroute package. May I help clear up one point of confusion evident in those calls?
Autoroute is the name of the road network system I designed in 1978 and then developed for the EEC Commission. It was an interactive system to replace the batch package Roadnet, which I had designed nine years earlier in the days of batch-mode computers.
It is therefore unfortunate that Nextbase has chosen the same name for its recently released package, also to do with computing the paths and measures of road-based travel. But the name is where the similarity ends; the two are quite different products.
Usage speeds The original Autoroute is a tool for logistical planning, with which the user (or, more likely, his computer) can immediately access the travel metrics to all destinations from any or all of his trip origins, in each case, along with the road paths between them.
The Nextbase Autoroute's task is to find the path from one origin to one destination. And in order to fit into a microcomputer with reasonable computation times, it must do that via an algorithm which cannot concern itself with more than one destination for the origin chosen.
Thus, to provide the metrics for a medium-sized logistical study — say, the trips betwen just 300 points — would require 90,000 such searches. Even at a modest 10 seconds each, that is 24 hours per day for over a week.
That assumes someone would be prepared to sit up and feed all those origindestination pairings in.
The original Autoroute is designed for just this; with its use of computer memory, its unique algorithm generates all 90,000 trips in minutes rather than days.
Resolution By use of a menu, Nextbase's Autoroute gives the user access to a choice for its origins and destinations from about 6,000 locations in Great Britain, each with its own (town) name. This is usually adequate to help the user figure out the details of an impending or potential road trip.
If, however, the user wants to consider places that are not town or village centres, such as he would in a depot-siting study, for instance, it is clearly not adequate. The original Autoroute allows the user to start and end his trips anywhere on the map, right down to lkra resolution.
Harold O'Brien,
Logistics Support, Robbery Bottom Lane, Welwyn, Hertfordshire.