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Cutting Operating Costs While Improving Service
Efficient fleet and vehicle planning, scheduling and dispatching are essential for transportation operators that want to improve service and increase reactivity, particularly when cost is a primary factor. Operators need to assign the right resources -- trucks, aircraft, locomotives, buses or ships -- to the right places at the right times. They must also generate savings while ensuring that feasible schedules meet policies and regulations.
When the number of resources, regulations and polices increases, and costs become exorbitant, it is impossible to efficiently schedule and allocate resources manually. Planning and scheduling (P&S) applications built with ILOG solutions help fleet operators to be more reactive, minimizing operational costs and guaranteeing that schedules are legal and feasible, from long-term strategic planning to short-term tactical operations.
Complete fleet scheduling solution
P&S applications that are flexible, business-driven and value-added need a combination of interactive 2D visualization and automated optimization for scheduling resources.
- 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, enabling planners to fully visualize and modify resource schedules. GUIs must also allow the 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 to make them work. This reduces effort during implementation, and contributes to keeping actual operational costs closer to projections. For example, taxi services can update cab assignments from two hours to a few minutes in advance. Railways can do the same with timetables when an incident occurs, ensuring traffic flow. Trucking companies can also assign vehicles to orders while comparing assignments with an optimal schedule to quickly evaluate each operational decision.
- Optimization
High-performance optimization and scheduling software rapidly computes schedules that most closely match criteria like cost, quality of service, demand coverage and employee satisfaction. Common examples include minimizing trucking costs by grouping shipments; shortening turnaround times at busy ports; and reducing the number of deadhead trains or trucks.
Full range of technologies
ILOG provides a full range of software technologies for implementing P&S applications, proven in the field through more than a decade of service. ILOG optimization technology dominates the industry, offering the only software for exactly matching resources to activities. ILOG business rule management solutions simplify the capturing and implementation of vast numbers of operational rules for fleet management. And ILOG visualization software gives users unequaled access to scheduling technology is, offering space-time diagrams, maps and the industry-standard Gantt charts.
Next steps
Learn more about how ILOG can help you costs and improve service through efficient planning and scheduling.
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