Sorry to dissapoint you and the few other curious ones, this was some 10 years ago and such details such as name of the company have fell of from my overfilled brain long ago. While the person who told me the story is a reputable fellow I must admit they still are a secondhand source. Being a finn I tend to trust people and take their word on it and, hence, do not recall doing my research to factcheck.
Still, it _is_ a good story, and plausible based on what I saw to be the state of the industry back then. Your run of the mill last-mile courier services were really badly organized, from the mathematics and optimization side as simple as they get, and ability to build a robust optimization transportation management system would've given serious competitive edge.
Geoffrey, thanks for sharing your story with us. OR sure is a weird niche. Good enough algorithms for solving these problems have existed for decades1, but we still see low adoption and your 95% estimate of the companies not optimizing their operations rings true.
Similarly to you, I spent a short while trying to sell VRP optimization with an API business model, and what dawned on me was that most companies do not have the necessary in-house expertise to integrate optimization into their existing tools even if the API is well-designed. There also really seems not to be any urgency to do that and most logistics companies just offload their inefficiencies onto their customers. Your routes are not effective? No problem, just bill more.
Some years ago I heard about a Swedish team of optimization experts who got so fed up with selling optimization to unwilling transportation companies that they founded their own—just to mop the floor with their ineffective competition. :D
I agree that ease of use is key here. In my PhD dissertation, I tried to address the issue by adding self-adaptivity within transportation management systems, mostly through automatic parameter tuning and algorithm selection. Such approaches remove some amount of fiddling when the optimization tool is adapted to a new optimization problem. Worth a look, perhaps, if you're interested.
Many thanks again for the interesting article and all the best with Timefold.
1) E.g., already by the '90s, we had quite capable algorithms for the VRP. I have open-sourced a library of classical VRP algorithms called VeRyPy, containing simple and not-so-simple heuristic algorithms. It has enjoyed modest success among VRP researchers and practitioners. Nowhere near the success of OptaPlanner, but also, the purpose is different—OptaPlanner is production-ready, whereas VeRyPy is more geared towards education and research purposes.
At least to me the argument does not hold water. My fear is that humans being human, simulation of a coral reef imaginary or future holodeck-like experiences will not save the actual coral reefs. They might even hasten their demise (as less people are interested of the "ugly" reality of the reefs). The tech is cool, but the environment angle, at least here, feels as an afterthought.
I agree and have been saying for a while that an AI you control and run (be it on your own hardware or on a rented one) will be the Linux of this generation. There is no other way to retain the freedom of information processing.
Nice. The resulting graphics style reminds me of a Short Hike, which is a family friendly bite sized 3D adventure and exploration game. I'm not affiliated in any way, just enjoyed the game with my kid. It has a nice balance of story, challenges, and some platformer action. https://ashorthike.com/
I blame being an operations researcher for always (pessimistically) first and foremost seeing how the system can be gamed. You have to think very very carefully what the objective function is and which kind of undesired solutions need to be forbidden using the constraints.
Yes, rather than exchange rate, I'd be more worried about corvids carrying trash from the landfill to exchange it to food. Or, in case of cigarette stubs, emptying well contained ashtrays to the tables and floors only to get to those valuable stubs.
Aka. the Chinese room argument. However, I'm not so sure us people are little more than just pattern matching machines. When I start to talk (or write, as I'm doing now), the words kind of just flow out. I can make the argument, that I understand the "real" world, but do I really?
Still, it _is_ a good story, and plausible based on what I saw to be the state of the industry back then. Your run of the mill last-mile courier services were really badly organized, from the mathematics and optimization side as simple as they get, and ability to build a robust optimization transportation management system would've given serious competitive edge.
(edit: removed repeated words)