Mappoint Routing Solution

I'm working on updating an in-house routing solution that has been working well for some time. However a change in requirements is causing some problems. While googling, I came across a Microsoft produc开发者_StackOverflow中文版t called MapPoint 2010.

From what I've read this product has an API that can be used from .net (c#). At present we use Google Maps to geocode the address and start locations of our engineers. I would like to be able pass this data to MapPoint, tag each job location as first call, am call or pm call, tag each engineer with a max allocation and ask MapPoint to allocate jobs to engineers. Once this completes, extract the data and pass it back to our SQL database. Is this something MapPoint can do?

Has anyone experience of using MapPoint for this type of requirement?

Mark

I believe that MapPoint does not provide such functionality by itself, but could help you with allocating tasks to your engineers and engineers to locations depending of the amount of resources and requests you have. But this logic basically needs to be implemented by you.

Yes as you've found, MapPoint can do simple routing, and even "Traveling Salesman Routing", however it cannot do any time or capacity optimization.

There are extensions available to do what you are looking for, but the price is typically at least an order of magnitude higher than MapPoint - this is because it is a "difficult" thing to computationally do. One of the lower cost products is "TourSolver". This ships with its own data and routing engine, but uses MapPoint for data input and final route display.