In 2014, EmpireCLS wanted to optimize their dispatch department by automating the chauffeur to reservation assignments that they have been manually doing for decades.
Building on the rules of the newly created dispatch application this application would attempt to automate as much of the work as possible. Some of the rules that would need to be taken into consideration are as follows; driver requests by customer, driver location to customer, VIP customer handling, where driver started their day, shift time, etc.
A real-time GPS tracking system was also required for this system so as to have constant visibility to driver location and time / duration to a customer location or when the customer would be dropped off.
We ended up treating output of the system as suggestions that the dispatcher could just accept as opposed to 100% automation. There were edge cases that could not be covered for 100% automation so suggesting vs. automating was the better solution.
A dispatcher using this tool was able to assign all of the work for the first shift drivers in seconds, where previously it took over an hour.
Technologies… C#, asp.net MVC, Mongo, SQL Server