RightChain Routing Transcript

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Dr. Frazelle (00:00): What's the difference between a route and a schedule? The route sequences stops and the schedule puts time to the seat. Those are very closely related. We're going to start with the routing piece and just by way of reminder, what is optimization? You write down the constraints. You write down the objective function and you find the solution that satisfies all the constraints and minimizes [00:00:30] or maximizes the objective function. Suppose we apply that to routing. There's an expression we use when we help companies set up metrics called what would mom do? Mom stands for mission optimization metrics. Write the mission statement for whatever the activity is. Then write the optimization statement and it will tell you [00:01:00] what you should measure. How would you know if you had done a good job setting up routes? What makes a good route? Every customer slash location is visited. Remember early on I said a three PL was relieved from their duties for saving their client too much money because they didn't meet all the pickups [00:01:30] and deliveries met all time window requirements. What's a time window? Dr. Frazelle (01:45): That's a time span. It's a period of time. The first of which I should not arrive before and the last of which I need to make sure I leave before. That's a time window. What else [00:02:00] minimizes fuel consumption Elapsed time meets hours of service requirements, meets safety requirements minimizes damage. [00:02:30] How could one route create more damage than another? Bad roads minimizes the probability of theft slash hijacking. If you're routing ships in today's world, better have this one on there. Maximizes [00:03:00] cube utilization. This sounded easy when we started. Anything else you want to add? Another one is balances workload. Dr. Frazelle (03:23): We did a project like this with Coca-Cola in Mexico. One of the big deals with them is the driver. Not [00:03:30] only do they deliver the goods, but they also collect the money and they're paid on commission. So if you don't give everyone the equal opportunity to earn a commission, you got some problems. Also, if you create these routes and one driver has six hours worth of work to do and the other has nine people get upset about things like that, right? So we're going to have to do some balancing in here. Anything else you want to add? Dr. Frazelle (04:00): [00:04:00] Very good. Meets traffic guidelines. Laws does not exceed the speed limit. Does not exceed weight limits on roads does not violate [00:04:30] one way. Streets minimizes wear and tear on equipment. How could one route do more damage to a piece of equipment than another? It's road conditions. Anything else you want to add? Sounded easy to start with. Routing. It's just a route. It's a lot harder than that now. That's the mission of routing [00:05:00] right there. How would you take those words and form them into an optimization? Let's go through these and see if we can characterize these as either objective function kinds of things or constraint kinds of things. Every customer is visited. Dr. Frazelle (05:21):

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