CLSS: An Intelligent Crane Lorry Scheduling System

Companies that provide crane-lorry services are faced with the daily need to perform vehicle and driver allocation and scheduling. Many companies still do this manually due to the lack of suitable technologies. This manual approach is both time consuming and inaccurate and most probably will not lead to an optimized plan that can reduce operational costs. In this paper, we describe the design of a system called “Crane Lorry Scheduling System” (CLSS) that we have developed for the largest crane lorry company in Hong Kong. A crane lorry company is a company that provides lorries with different types of mounted crane equipment and drivers to service different types of moving and lifting jobs. CLSS is a Web-based application that streamlines communication with customers, subcontractors and employees/lorry drivers. We modeled the lorry-assignment problem as a constraint-satisfaction problem (CSP) algorithm, which we call the “Crane Lorry Optimizing Engine” (CLOE). CLOE was designed to be easily customizable to match the needs and requirements of different crane lorry companies. We experimented with two versions of CLOE, regular CLOE that finds “best” solutions and X-CLOE that finds “optimal” solutions. Results from our tests show that CLOE is faster and generates better quality plans than the manual approach.

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