Would you like to be in charge of getting 50,000 shipments of heavy freight on 2,100 trucks to 200 locations across 25 U.S. states and Canada every 12 hours with your boss demanding that you do it as fast and as cheaply as possible? Never mind all the customer requests for service that keep coming in while you’re trying to deal with the set you started with. Then there are road conditions and other considerations, for example, ice and snow somewhere causing traffic to be diverted. While you’re thinking about your problems and how to solve them, the trucks and drivers are standing idle in the depots waiting for orders on when to move out and where to go.

This is exactly how the dispatchers of Con-Way Central Express’s line-haul company operated for years and years. It was a case of working feverishly from clock-in to clock-out. The eight dispatchers were constantly shouting at each other questions like “Have you got anyone in your area who can divert to Indianapolis for two units?” If not, a driver would have to make a trip of 130 miles that wouldn’t generate any revenue.

People at Con-Way realized that there must be a better way to go. So they hired YaFeng Du, a former Chinese army rocket scientist and industrial engineer, to develop an expert system to help with their gargantuan task. YaFeng figured it would take six months, but he told his boss a year to give himself some wiggle room. In fact it ended up taking five years and $3 million.

The dispatchers, who were the domain experts, worked hard and long to help YaFeng understand how they did their jobs and what they had learned from years of on-the-job training. The system expanded to thousands of rules that had to be developed and tested. Since it sometimes took more than a month for a problem to surface, such as that on a certain route a driver would be stranded so far from home he was unable to make it home by the end of the shift, the testing process was grueling.

Despite the rocky road to the end product, all agree that it was worth it. Now, instead of frantically trying to make up schedules based only on experience and what seemed right at the time, the expert system provides a routing plan for 95 percent of the shipments in seven minutes. The dispatchers then use their time to look into possible problems and discrepancies at a finer level, like freight size or weight that seems out of line, and they readjust the schedule accordingly. One of the big benefits of the expert system is better customer relationship management. With the automated system, Con-Way can take orders much later than its competition and has improved its on-time delivery rate. Con-Way has become the perennial earning leader in its niche of less-than-full-truckload, time-and-day-definite freight delivery.