Fleet management, from Amazon shipping, to municipal school bus routing is complex.
The world is too complicated for fleet managers to strictly rely on their intuition.
Fortunately, fleet managers can rely on mathematical optimization.
While optimization is a highly advanced and technical discipline,
from a project manager perspective it's easy as 1-2-3. The formula is English, Greek, Code.
As example let's explore an August 2020 problem statement from US Transportation Command,
the entity that controls US Air Force assets.
First, decision makers should carefully establish the problem statement in plain language, English
"Meet all requirements with minimum tanker cost."
Second, leverage optimization specialists to translate the
clearly defined problem statement to the language of mathematics, Greek.
And third, provide the mathematical specifications
to computer science experts to start programming in code.