Industry Partners

The Air Mobility Command

The Air Mobility Command, centered at Scott Airforce Base, undertakes a number of studies focused on the effective use of resources. This work requires running large simulations that capture the constraints of aircraft, airbases, fuel, loading, maintenance, personnel, and so on. The problems faced by the AMC analysis group represent some of the hardest resource management problems that we face in the lab. ** **

The Norfolk Southern Railroad

  The Norfolk Southern Railroad Any major railroad today offers a rich set of modeling challenges. We are working with Norfolk Southern to develop and implement systems for real-time and tactical planning of its locomotive fleet. This work is part of a larger effort to reorganize the flow of information within the railroad.         Above, we are looking at the flows of locomotives over the network, colored by the t ype of power. To the left, we are drilling into a single yard, at a point in time, looking at the formation of individual consists (usually two to four locomotives required to pull a single train) that may be assigned to each outbound train.

Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad

  Burlington Northern Sante Fe Railroad The BNSF, in partnership with Norfolk Southern, is working on the development of an advanced power planning system. Using the DRiP modeling paradigm, we are researching new types of dynamic programming approximations that are useful for this problem class. The project has also motivated the development of an advanced diagnostic facility, called Pilotview, Version 4.

Air Products and Chemicals

  Air Products and Chemicals Air Products and Chemicals posed us with a challenging resource scheduling problem: how to deliver product to a customer when we have to figure out which driver, which tractor, which trailer, where to get the right type of product, and finally, when to deliver to the customer. **  **This is called resource layering. All of our problems involve some level of resource layering, but the chemical distribution problem is perhaps the hardest we have seen. Research into this problem will help us in other projects.a

Burlington Motor Carriers

Burlington Motor Carriers Burlington Motor Carriers was long-haul truckload carrier with what appears on the surface to be a nice, easy dynamic resource management problem. All we had to do was figure out what customers they should serve at what price, what loads should be accepted as they were called in, and what driver should be assigned to each load. The relative simplicity of truckload operations allowed us to focus on the challenge of implementing operational systems. We learned, for example, that getting the optimal solution is not really optimal (unless you have perfect user compliance).  

Triple Crown Services

  Triple Crown Services Each of our corporate partners has taught us something significant about their particular brand of resource management problem. Triple Crown taught us how to solve short-haul problems, quickly, and under uncertainty. Triple Crown manages a special type of trailer called a “RoadRailer” which can run over the road, or be pulled by a locomotive over rails (with the addition of a rail wheelset). Our problem was to handle the truck side, where the challenge was to schedule drivers over a sequence of relatively short loads. Since new loads are called in continuously, and because dispatchers to not always follow the recommendations of the model, we have the problem of scheduling drivers through a sequence of loads.