Patent ID: 8762291
Filing Date: 2014-06-24
Classification: G06Q

Abstract:
1. A computer-implemented method for generating a robust delivery schedule for delivering a commodity product to a set of customers, the method comprising: generating, by operation of at least one computer processor, one or more production outage scenarios based on historical production facility outage data, wherein each production outage scenario specifies a period of time during which a first one of one or more production facilities is presumed to be unavailable to produce the commodity product, wherein the commodity product comprises industrial gases delivered to a storage tank at each customer site via at least one delivery truck; generating a set of solutions, wherein each solution specifies a delivery schedule for delivering the commodity product to the set of customers; determining a cost for each solution relative to each generated scenario; evaluating the cost of each solution according to a specified evaluation method to compute a robustness measure for each solution, wherein the robustness measure is determined based an expected change in the cost of the solution relative to the one or more production outage scenarios; and returning, as the robust delivery schedule, a solution having a best determined cost versus robustness measure tradeoff, relative to other solutions in the generated set of solutions.