Mission:
To determine the best schedule for an insurance company's mailroom.Challenge:
Schedule 50 work centers with 200 simultaneous jobs to achieve maximum
throughput in the minimum time, handling job priorities.
Solution:
A custom scheduler was built using Genetic Algorithms.
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Objective
A large insurance company issues thousands of credit card, billings,
policies, advertisements, and other mailings from their San Antonio offices.
This is no small operation, rivaling the complexity of many manufacturing
plants. The objective is to schedule more than 200 jobs across 50 work
centers in order to minimize total time (job start to finish), lateness and
handle priority jobs.
The Methods
BioComp engineers came on site and teamed up with the Customer's
experts to lay out the objectives and constraints for the challenge.
The problem was defined and a custom application was developed that used
Genetic Algorithms to search through various possible routings and
sequences. The schedule could be imported into the company's project
management software (as well as Microsoft Project) for final schedule
printing and distribution.
Results
The scheduler was able to achieve optimal schedules (tested
on known cases) in seconds. The optimizer was so good, the Microsoft's
"Microsoft Project" team reviewed the capability for potential use within
their product. |
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