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Optimally Matching People With Vehicles
Effective crew or driver assignment greatly improves a transport or transit operation's reactivity and service quality. Careful scheduling can also keep costs down, improving both customer and employee satisfaction. The tremendous complexity of this type of scheduling makes it almost impossible to master without advanced decision-support solutions. When resources, regulations and operating costs rise, ILOG provides planning and scheduling (P&S) solutions that help companies stay agile and competitive.
Essentials of scheduling
A flexible, business-driven P&S tool requires a combination of interactive 2D visualization and automated optimization -- primary capabilities provided by ILOG technology.
- Visualization and editing
The first decision-support tool users encounter in resource scheduling and allocation should be a dynamic, interactive graphical user interface (GUI). Scheduling GUIs must provide a business-oriented view of plans and schedules. Typically, they should be based on a Gantt-type chart or space-time diagram to enable planners to fully visualize and modify resource schedules. GUIs must also allow planners to evaluate a schedule, and quickly see the impact of changes. This is especially critical in short-term scheduling and D-Day management.
- Automatic construction and updating
Automated scheduling can provide decision support by computing or suggesting new or updated schedules that are feasible and legal. Systems should allow operators to quickly adapt schedules, and reallocate resources to meet short-term, last-minute changes. Enforcing feasibility ensures that schedules will be executed without late tweaking. This reduces effort during implementation, and contributes to keeping actual operational costs closer to projections.
- Optimization
High-performance optimization and scheduling software quickly computes schedules that match criteria like cost, quality of service, demand coverage and employee satisfaction. Such software fully models an operation, and uses high-speed algorithms to quickly find the best or most feasible solution to a scheduling problem.
Full range of technologies
ILOG is unique in that it provides the full range of software technologies needed to implement crew and driver scheduling applications, proven in the field through more than a decade of service. ILOG optimization technologies dominate the industry as the only software for exactly matching resources to activities. Capturing and implementing vast numbers of operational, legal and work rules has been simplified with ILOG's business rule management solutions. And ILOG visualization software gives users unequaled access to scheduling technology, offering space-time diagrams, maps and the industry-standard Gantt chart.
Next steps
Learn more about how ILOG can help you cut costs and improve service through effective crew scheduling.
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