AA ROUTES PROCESSING
The Road to Rome in 30 Seconds.
The Long and the Short of it.
According to the PC's statistics, the Rome trip is
1515.9 miles long on the AA recommended route, taking 24.04 hours;
the scenic alternative covers 1493.3 miles but takes 34.06 hours, and
the shortest route is 1484.2 miles and takes the longest - 35.02 hours.
How long do you think it takes to plot the 1500 miles of a scenic route from Calais to Rome - via Vienna? The answer is delivered by a new £250,000 PC system which was installed earlier this year in the Routes Processing Department in the AA's Bristol headquarters. It takes less than 30 seconds! And details on service areas, signposting information and places of interest are also available almost instantly.
As a result, response time has been vastly improved for both home and overseas routes requests. The 18 GB and European route compilers, led by Gary Bartlett, Head of Routes Processing, handle 250,000 requests for home routes, and nearly 12,000 Continental routes a year.
'As we usually are asked for more than one route at a time, we send off in the region of half a million routes a year,' says Gary. Handling the European requests are Simon Mercer and his team of five compilers who can between them generate an income of more than £200,000 from the standard charge of £14.50 for one foreign route.
In the winter months, when requests for home routes can be as low as 200 a day, the eight home compilers pride themselves on a 24 hour turn-round with the new equipment, but in the peak summer months of July and August when UK requests can go up to more than 2000, they each hope to deal with more than 100 routes a day and fulfill the demand within 48 hours. The routes are dispatches in sturdy packages containing impressive concertina-like computerised printouts of one or more routes, as well as townplans and general information leaflets.
Depending on the request, the compilers can plot a scenic alternative of the journey taking in locations specially asked for, as well as provide the AA recommended, quickest route. For AA members only, an updated leaflet is included, listing the long term road works, opening dates of new stretches, and major events. It also lists notorious bottlenecks.
But it isn't only the private motorist, whether he is an AA member or not, who takes advantage of the AA's routes service. There is a growing market in furnishing the haulage industry, and commercial companies in Britain and on the Continent with custom made routes for their fleet of trucks or for personal journeys by their staff.
These can also be processed much more quickly with the new equipment using over 30,000 more route nodes (cartographic markers that allow a route to be constructed piecemeal on modular lines) than were available on the 12 year old outdated Prime mainframe system.
As Mark Denley, 25 year old section leader) explains: 'For UK routes, we can instantly call up colour coded data on the shortest route, the recommended route, the scenic route, routes avoiding motorways, caravan routes that avoid steep hills, and routes bypassing low bridges. The alternatives are listed on the menu, and we can work on them instantly without having to wait for machines to be free to use. The data tells me straight away exactly how many miles each route is, and how long it takes under normal driving conditions.'
Another section concentrates on specialist routes for motorists requiring detailed information on how to get to a particular address. The compilers, working with section leader Peter Smith, may need to consult maps and local town plans to work out the route before feeding the information into the new system for printing out.
One of the most bizarre requests was for a charity event for which the member wanted to ski down every artificial ski slope in Britain. 'We found 88 for him in England, Scotland and Wales, and sent him the location details and how to get there,' says Peter. 'We also get lots of requests from football and rugby fans for routes to away matches.
There may even be a legal request to confirm the accuracy of a distance, crucial in a court case, or a route safe for high sided vehicles.
From News and Views
AA Commercial Services Focus, Issue No.12, April 1993.