[Freegis-list] DeliveryPlanning software

[Bill Thoen]

Hi Listers!

Does anyone know if there exists a ready-to-run, city-oriented delivery 
route-planning software package? A friend of mine needs something which 
can help them plan patients' trips to medical offices AND provide some 
sort of data synchronization between said routing software and our 
database. Basically, the problem is one of assigning volunteer drivers 
to pick up people for scheduled medical visits, then taking them home 
when the visits are done.  I believe the first half of each trip can be 
scheduled in advance (days beforehand), but the return trip timing would 
depend on the finish time for the patient (which is variable depending 
on doctor workload and patient diagnosis).

It would be nice to find something written in Java which they could plug 
into their existing program, but that's not absolutely required.

So the second choice is to use a program running on a separate system, 
with data exchange capabilities.  That separate system would most 
probably be running Windows (assuming they'd use an existing computer), 
but it wouldn't be hard for me to set up a Linux box for them, either, 
so the solution need not be limited to either platform. As far as I 
know, they don't currently have any general-purpose GIS software in 
house, so we're looking for something stand-alone.

Any help on who makes something like that would be appreciated.

- Bill Thoen