How a Community Worked Together to Create Hand Sanitizer

Hand sanitizers are a hot commodity these days, with availability in short supply. Last month, Temasek Foundation partnered with People’s Association to distribute non-alcohol based hand sanitizers.

Water, a key ingredient for hand sanitizers, and other Ready-to-Use mixed sanitizer ingredients, needed to be tested for impurities before use. National University of Singapore (NUS) Temasek Life Science Laboratory agreed to do the testing of water needed for the manufacture of these hand sanitizers. Strides Transportation, the fleet operator arm of SMRT, volunteered to provide vehicles and drivers to transport the water from 89 community centres around Singapore to the testing lab in NUS.  

What is the most efficient way to collect all the samples? This is when Strides called in SWAT Mobility to help them quickly generate the routes.

How SWAT planned the routes

Water samples from 89 community centres located around Singapore needed to be transported to NUS within 3 hours. How many vehicles would this require, and what routes will they drive? There are 2.38 x 10^17 potential solutions to these questions. Manual planning for all of these possible combinations could take hours and is also unlikely to generate the most efficient routes. The team at Strides initially estimated 10 vehicles for the job, but SWAT’s powerful routing algorithm produced a route that met all the constraints with only 6 vehicles. The resulting routes were generated in minutes and fully accounted for traffic at the time of day planned for collection.

SWAT’s algorithms are usually used to move people efficiently, but they also proved their mettle in quickly routing this precious cargo. 

We are proud to have this opportunity to contribute to the effort of combating the spread of Covid-19. We hope that everyone can find their own avenues to offer help and join hands as a community to overcome this situation.

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About SWAT

SWAT Mobility is a Singapore-based tech company specialising in transport solutions powered by demand-responsive pooling and routing technology. A large part of our work focuses on employee transport. It involves generating optimised custom routes based on employees’ demand, increasing the overall service efficiency and offering employees greater convenience and control over their commute. 

If you are running split teams due to BCP, we can work with your existing bus operators to automate your transport planning and help you deploy buses for only the employees coming to work. 

About Strides 

One of SWAT Mobility’s transport partner is Strides Transportation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SMRT Corporation Ltd. As one of the leading chartered bus service providers in Singapore, Strides operates shuttle and premium bus services for individual companies and their employees. SWAT’s technology optimises routes for these fleets, streamlines billing, and offers increased convenience to employees during their work commute.