RightChain Routing Transcript

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plus minimize total elapsed time. You can't mix units of measure and objective function and you can't mix directions. I can't say maximize CU utilization plus minimize elapsed [00:10:30] hours. It has to be something you're trying to minimize or maximize in a common unit of measure. Otherwise, no software tool on the planet Earth can deal with it. No human being really can deal with it. That's the characteristic of an objective function. Same unit of measure and directly it's going one way. Here's what we had for objectives. Minimizes fuel consumption, minimizes the driver's time, minimizes the elapsed time [00:11:00] minimizes damage, maximizes CU utilization, minimizes wear and tear on the equipment. Is there some way to summarize all of those in a unit of measure? What are you really trying to do? Dr. Frazelle (11:22): Minimize cost. Who said that but you're trying to minimize [00:11:30] the cost of the route. Minimize total routing cost. Now what costs would be included in there? Fuel driver's time plus capital. The equipment plus maintenance, so if you take that objective [00:12:00] function with these constraints, that is an optimization statement for routing, but if you can take that through mission optimization metrics. Now given this, what should the metrics be for the performance of routing? What should I measure to figure [00:12:30] out how good a job I'm doing with routing given this cost per stop might be one. Total routing cost. What portion of that is fuel versus the driver's time versus capital versus maintenance? Dr. Frazelle (12:49): The hours each route is taking. How many accidents are occurring? The metrics are right there. Mission optimization metrics. How many trucks are in the Wawa [00:13:00] fleet and how many stores? How many ways are there to send 200 trucks to 580 stores? A giga trillion Coca-Cola, Luis, how many trucks in that fleet? A lot. Giga trillion Visiting a giga trillion locations. UPS the same way. Schneider I'm sure is the same way. These numbers are so huge that a human being is not going to be able to figure it out. They might [00:13:30] get started, they might get a good solution, but they're probably not going to get an optimal solution. What difference does it make in a big problem? It makes a big difference. Normally good routing software will be between five and 20% better than a human being. Now five to 20% on the total routing cost for the Wawa fleet, Coca-Cola fleet, the UPS fleet, [00:14:00] the Norfolk Southern Fleet, the Schneider fleet, these big fleets, those are big numbers. Dr. Frazelle (14:05): Many millions that you can afford to invest to make things better. In my PhD program, I took a course called Complexity theory. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. The only thing we did was to figure out how difficult problems are to solve. We never solved one. That was the problem. To assign the problem to a classification [00:14:30] of difficult. This routing problem right here is in the most difficult class of problems there is, so if you ever wondered why is that so hard? It's in that classification that is so hard that if you just let a computer run forever and it was the fastest computer in the whole, it would never find the optimal solution. Dr. Frazelle (14:56):

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