2 Dot 0 Research and Development

Transportation Optimization - Execution Collaborator

2 Dot 0 has developed the concept for an exciting product that will enable effective collaboration between deep, multi-stop, continuous-move transportation optimization and real-time transportation execution systems. Long solution times have led many industry leading transportation management system (TMS) and eTMS vendors to forgo the use of dynamic routing and other valuable but computationally costly optimization strategies, because of a phenomenon we call the "stale state problem." By the time the optimization algorithms have devised a plan, some of the inputs to the plan--resource availabilities or delivery requirements have changed--the state is stale--rendering the solution infeasible, suboptimal, or both. Our research is leading to an implementable software solution that gets this situation under control using graph theory, propagation, database transaction, and business rule techniques, to allow error-free, deep transportation planning integration even against very dynamic enterprise execution backbones. The solution also eases many of the process integration headaches by a combination of intelligent notification and smooth cross-application integration.

A compelling bonus from our research is that the results may be generalizable to other real-time optimization domains. After decomposition of the transportation optimization process into abstract business objects and interactions, it's evident that the domain of transportation optimization is not that different from others in the supply- and demand-chain and manufacturing sectors.