José Antonio Comesaña Benavides

Creating an expert system for detailed scheduling

This paper presents our experience in the development of an expert system to be used for detailed scheduling in an industrial company. This was a middle‐sized company which builds metallic components for the automotive industry. Because of the complexity of the environment where it has to work, with many interactions between related functions in the company, the development of this system has required a great deal of collaboration among different experts. So, we had to develop a more sophisticated methodology for this development. The conclusions extracted from this work lead us to a generalization of the methodology employed, which is also presented here.

Designing a fair, financially sustainable pay rate for owner operator truck drivers. Modeling and Case Study

ABSTRACT Owner operator truck drivers have been dealing with a long-standing problem: compensation per distance. Owner operators who get paid according to these criteria get a fixed payment per distance traveled regardless of how long it takes to actually cover the distance. This means that there are numerous situations that truck drivers are working; yet they might be unpaid because the truck is not moving. To compensate for the unfairness of the pay rate models, owner operators have continuously increased their working hours. In addition, many studies have confirmed that a fair payment is among the most important factors that truck drivers take into consideration when deciding to leave a company. Consequently, an unfair pay rate, along with the hard labor conditions truck drivers suffer from, inevitably leads to high turnover rates. For all these reasons, our study aims at developing a fair, financially sustainable pay rate for owner operators that will help companies ensure a stable and highly experienced workforce by making sure that owner operators can cover the real expenses of their working activity. Finally, in order to prove that our pay rate was of practical use, we test the model on one of the largest Spanish agro-food companies.