Articles
OPSI CEO, Dr. David Lubinsky and Technical Writer Rick de Klerk are regular contributors to the respected monthly publication, Logistics News.
| Gaming the System (September 2011) In my previous column, I described how players were exploring and implementing various routing and scheduling principles to leverage an advantage in an online game. But what if the output of the game defines the principles that drive real-world scheduling and optimisation? |
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| Finding the Spectacle (August 2011) Part of the issue of conveying how interesting routing and scheduling can be, is that routing and scheduling problems – and the mathematical challenges involved in solving them - don’t lend themselves to spectacle, especially when in placed in the context of trucks and parcels. |
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| Turning Bikes into Mountain Goats (July 2011) It’s 1932, and Robert E. Martin - writer for the Popular Science magazine - is at an official motorcycle meet to cover an up-and-coming sport. And while the, quote, “Motorcycles, many of them carrying girls with gay knickers and wind-tanned faces”, may prove somewhat distracting, his attention is on the small group of determined bikers gathering at the bottom of an extremely steep incline made of loose dirt, dust, gravel and a defiance of gravity. |
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| The Travelling Delegate Problem (June 2011) We decided, since SAPICS around the corner, to optimising your experience at SAPICS for maximum benefit. We’ve worked on a hypothetical scenario where the average SAPICS user would want to visit all the booths for an average of 10 minutes in order to get a fair idea of what the companies have on offer, arrange meetings, attend presentations and ultimately squeeze as much in as possible. |
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| Dice & Deviations: The Value of Cheating (March 2011) Here at the office, we deal with optimisation algorithms on a daily basis, some mentioned outright in this column and some through example. However, it is occasionally difficult to provide real-world analogies to algorithms whose effectiveness live and die by the computational power available to them. |
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| Logistic Considerations in a Crowdsourced Future (December 2010) Routing and scheduling is part and parcel (o-ho) of what OPSI Systems does, and much of it involves navigating the complex and intricate network of roads, highways and byways of modern urban areas. So what happens when one of the largest courier and postal delivery companies in the world proposes an idea that could, quite literally, eliminate the need for dedicated vehicles and drivers in every inner city altogether? |
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| Trends in Supply Chain Automation (Novemeber 2010) Gartner is no doubt a name well-known to readers involved in the task of implementing and evaluating information technology solutions for their logistic operations. One of the pivotal areas Gartner has made a name for itself is its Magic Quadrants, which provided a summarised overview of the largest players in the IT space for various industries. |
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| We're Still Green at Green Supply Chains (October 2010) Green is the new gold, and logistic operations are eager to get their operations stamped with non-indelible ink and approved with biodegradable carbon certificates. Even at our own company, we’ve just introduced the Carbon Emissions tracker in PLATO, which will allow fleet operators to get a good handle on how much carbon their vehicles are generating during their day-to-day operations. |
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| Concluding the Ant Trilogy (September 2010) We’ve discussed Ant Colony Optimisation more than any reasonable person should. So, to close off the subject once and for all, I thought I would point you in the direction of “Smart Swarms” – a book by senior National Geographic journalist Peter Miller that covers the subject in far more detail than we can ever hope to cover in this column – as well as mention a very specific case to highlight the impact it can have. |
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| Ant Colony Optimisation (August 2010) A couple of months ago we discussed a way of optimising picking in a warehouse that was based on observations of how ants move food to their nests. In this month’s column I would like to focus on another optimisation method inspired by observations of ant colonies. |
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