IIT-M develops new app for easier & efficient transportation of goods

CHENNAI: Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M) on Monday informed that it has designed and developed a mobile application to enable easier and efficient transportation of goods within cities.

Called ‘OptRoute’, this mobile phone app connects a driver with the consumer and does not take any commission or on-boarding fee.

The payment from the consumer goes directly to the driver, with no intermediaries.

“The first version of the App has been developed and commercialised through OptRoute Logistics, an IIT Madras-incubated start-up co-founded by professor NS Narayanaswamy, and Anuj Fulia, an IIT Madras alumnus. The basic ideas behind the App were presented during the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference held in Cancun, Mexico. The start-up has also developed packing and efficient vehicle space utilisation methods, which will be included in the application once sufficient initial traction is achieved.” said a release from IIT-Madras.

Highlighting the problems this app sets out to eventually resolve, professor Narayanaswamy said, “OptRoute aims to solve the issues in connectivity between drivers and customers in the goods logistics and transport domain. The main issues faced are unavailability of return load for transporters and vehicle capacity under-utilisation. Current market of this domain is highly unorganised making it inefficient. It is also ripe for deployment of technology based solutions to reach the goals set by the National Logistics Policy, 2022.”

The OptRoute application has two user modes - Driver and Customer.

In the Customer mode, users can place any goods transport request for which a vehicle is needed.

In the Driver mode, users can view the available requests and accept them.

The OptRoute app is available for Android devices and can be installed from Google Play Store.