Scheduling short-term marine transport of bulk products

摘要

A multinational company uses a personal computer to schedule afleet of coastal tankers and barges transporting liquid bulk productsamong plants, distribution centers (tank farms), and industrialcustomers. A simple spreadsheet interface cloaks a sophisticatedoptimization-based decision support system and makes this systemuseable via a variety of natural languages. The dispatchers, whosenative language is not English, and come of whom presumably speak noEnglish at all, communicate via the spreadsheet, and view recommendedschedules dis- played in Gantt charts-both internationally familiartools.