About Prospector

A good runcut must juggle many constraints effectively if it is to satisfy the work rules governing legal runs, provide sufficient on-street resources throughout the day, and avoid excess vehicles in off-peak periods.

The traditional method of using spreadsheets to generate runcuts can be extremely time-consuming and yet still fail to produce a good solution.

Prospector allows you to define the number of runs you want on the street throughout the day. This service profile serves as the basis of the runcut to be performed later on. The idea behind Prospector is that future requirements should be based on an understanding of the level of demand that has been experienced in the past, the amount of service that is put on the street to meet that demand, and the level of success that has been experienced with that amount of service.

It is not assumed that the service put on the street was the ideal amount. Actual run start and end times may vary significantly from scheduled start and end times as dispatchers react to demand. Underutilized vehicles and consistently late vehicles are evidence of overcapacity or undercapacity, respectively. In many cases, the number of vehicles on the street in the past may have come from efforts to adhere to work rule requirements, such as minimum shift length, maximum spread, or maximum number of part time drivers.

By isolating those issues, the runcut performed for the next pick does not have to automatically include unnecessary service. That is, if it can find a way to do without unnecessary hours, it has an opportunity to do so. It gives the greatest possible chance of ensuring that payroll dollars are allocated at the time of day that they are most needed.

Prospector allows you to mine your historical service records to project the minimum vehicular requirements in each time slot throughout the day. It allows you to research past schedules and identify representative service days that meet your target service level profile. It does this by evaluating historical days not only for their aggregate demand but also for the representativeness of their demand profile throughout the service day. It then applies user-configurable heuristics to adjust for situations where the actual supply was either less or more than was needed. ParaCutter makes extensive use of graphical tools to help you visualize every step of this analysis. It also allows discretionary manual adjustments as needed.