Technologies

The Quantum Online Routing System (QORS) is a state-of-the-art routing platform that provides dynamic routes based on multiple static and dynamic criteria such as speed, travel time, traffic avoidance and road pricing charge minimization. QORS is available as a custom HTTP server (as an application or service) that can be easily installed within an enterprise environment to support static or dynamic routing applications. QORS is readily integrated with applications in fleet management, personnel management, resource allocation and routing websites.Between any pair of locations, QORS creates multiple routes and provides an XML response with various details embedded in it. The front-end API is customizable on request, but is traditionally a web-based API.

Use of QORS
QORS can be set up on a dedicated machine or on a shared server. Being fully multi-threaded internally, QORS supports scaling directly by adding more CPU performance (more GHz), adding more CPU cores (either on the same CPU or on multiple CPUs) or by adding more hardware machines behind some sort of load balancer. Being based on HTTP, the best practices of HTTP scaling can be applied to get more performance out of QORS. Applications can make requests to QORS over a web-based API and receive an XML response containing the details of the routes.

For easy integration in corporate or sensitive environments, QORS incorporates an embedded web server (requires only 1 port open on the firewall) and an embedded database module so that there are no external dependencies. For performance reasons, QORS also supports a single HTTP request to request for multiple routes between the origin and destination – so, the response to a single request may include up to eight routes!

In dynamic routing settings, QORS needs to be set up with the QORS Dynamic Data Updater that can pull dynamic information from the source and prepare it for use within QORS. This allows the creation of routes that can deal with constraints such as real-time traffic and urban road pricing. For example, for Singapore, QORS can deal with traffic data being updated every minute (flow data is updated every five minutes) and with road pricing (ERP) data being updated in granularity as fine as 5 minutes.

Toll Avoidance versus Urban Road Pricing Minimization: QORS supports both toll avoidance and urban road pricing minimization. In toll avoidance, routes are created to avoid traversing segments that are charged – in most cases, toll avoidance only considers the roads without caring for the time of operation of the toll.However, in urban road pricing schemes implemented for congestion control, the toll charge varies through the day. In the case of Singapore, the ERP rates change as often as every five minutes. QORS is able to process and use this information when creating ERP-aware routes.

Clients 

QORS has been used for numerous projects with different clients:

• Singapore Computer Systems (SCS) for Ministry of Defence/ Defence Science & Technology Association
• Accenture for Ministry of Defence/ Defence Science & Technology Association
• As part of SingTel TrafficLIVE
• Land Transport Authority
• Singapore RDS-TMC service offered by QI