Hard Chargers I need some guidance on creating a Freight Evaluation Tool

My Brother-in-law owns a Trucking Company and I am trying to help him out. Unfortunately he is not the sharpest tool in Grandma's kitchen. I'm endeavoring to create a Freight Evaluation Tool to the evaluate loads and let him know if the load is worth his time of not.

 

 

Sorry can't help you with this program/app problem, but did find retail versions here https://www.google.com/search?q=Truck+load+board+calculator+evaluation&ei=PTvbY8-EGqTQ5NoP8b-pgAQ&ved=0ahUKEwiPl7il__X8AhUkKFkFHfFfCkAQ4dUDCA8&uact=5&oq=Truck+load+board+calculator+evaluation&gs

Edited by 0lds0d, 01 February 2023 - 11:30 PM.

Solutions for you might be relate to the sort of solutions to a question to "Travelling Salesmen" and Dijkstras algorithm problems with real road networks, . Then once the magic bit of geospatial data has given you a distance a trivial python or R script can calculate an approximate fuel usage and multiply by an approx averaged cost per litre.

Honestly though, there are so many big assumptions going into this sort of calculation, that exactness is hardly wort striving for given all the errors other matters will introduce. Route lengths won't say what is open road, wiggly back-lane, or stop-start town driving, all of which afect fuel use and time. Fuel prices in diferent states are meaningless, better to just use a single average price, because where the truck has to refill will vary a lot, it won't be predictable which state's prices will apply when and where it does (and rural vs urban petrol stations have very different pricing). Might be better to just use a really crude model and say the driven distance is perhaps 2 times (to account for wiggly roads, there might be a much better figure than 2 derivable from averaging out how route distance compares to crow-flies distance for a large number of random origin/destination points) the straight line distance along a geocentric great-circle between the latitude-longitude co-ords of the two nearest reasonably size towns to the destination and start points you feed it.

Edited by rp88, 27 February 2023 - 10:37 PM.