DPlan: a case study on the cooperation between university and industry

The aim of this paper is to explain how the research interests of a university group have been matched with the real needs of a distribution company team working in the field. It describes a case study of technology transfer, from research, through prototyping, to the market. This paper also addresses the formulation and the main evolutionary computation techniques used to deal with the problem of optimal distribution planning. The integration of all systems currently in operation is a priority of EDP distribution. The strategy is to arrive at a situation where those systems become modules of an integration platform. The infrastructure for this integration platform is a geographic information system. In the paper we describe the integration of DPlan in this platform.