Olga Raskina
I am an Operations Research principal at Con-way
Freight. I have been with the company since August 2009, working on
analytical models to support its strategic directions. Prior to Con-way
I worked at the software company Emptoris, where I held the Lead
scientist position, leading the research efforts for all company’s
products. I was responsible for research and
production development of patented and patent-pending large-scale integer and
nonlinear algorithms for supply chains and combinatorial auctions, data
cleansing and classification techniques for high volume spend management, and
natural language technology for intelligent semantic analysis of legal
documents.
I am an active member of Informs,
currently serving on the Informs Chapters Committee and Subdivisions
Council. I have served as the VP of Informs Boston for the last three years
and am currently leading the Michigan chapter.
I received her PhD in Operations Research from the IEOR department of Columbia University in 2003.
Con-way
Freight is one of the largest LTL carriers in North America. Less-Than-Truckload
(LTL) shipping is the transportation of relatively small freight, an LTL
company generally mixes freight from several customers in each trailer and
"carpools" the freight to a common destination.
LTL
carriers collect freight from various shippers and consolidate that freight
onto trailers for linehaul to the delivering terminal or to a hub terminal
where the freight will be further sorted and consolidated for additional
linehauls. An LTL shipment may be handled only once while in transit, or it may
be handled multiple times before final delivery is accomplished. The main
advantage to using an LTL carrier is that a shipment may be transported for a
fraction of the cost of hiring an entire truck and trailer for an exclusive
shipment.
Con-way Freight has more than 365 operating locations, has
over 18,000 employees, and over 32000 tractors and trailers.
There are many OR-related problems in the LTL world. We
solve a large-scale network design and optimization problem to decide which
hubs each shipment and each truck goes through so that we minimize the miles it
travels and the miles our trucks travel empty. In addition we have to consider
daily workforce requirements, shift schedules at every terminal, working
regulations for the drivers and uncertainty in daily demand. With over 300
terminals in our network and almost complete set of point-to-point demands this
becomes a very challenging OR problem.
There are plenty of other operations-related problems. We
need to decide how to combine shipments in a trailer to optimize trailer utilization
and also the number of time a shipment is moved from trailer to trailer. You
can think of it as minimizing the number of "connections" each shipment makes
before it reaches its final destination. We solve a vehicle routing type problems
to create pick-up and delivery schedules for our trucks.
In addition to operations the OR team works with many other function
within Con-way. We have built several models for the sales organization that
help assign sales territories and create sales goals for the account executives
to optimize the company’s profit.
We work with the marketing group to identify customers who
are likely to be unhappy with the services and develop countermeasures before
they defect.
We work with the finance department on financial
forecasts and with the pricing department do develop differential pricing
schemas for different types of customers.