Starting today, Optimal Dynamics Chief Innovation Officer, Warren Powell will begin a series of educational posts on decision analytics for trucking and supply chain management. In addition to co-founding Optimal Dynamics, Warren is a Professor Emeritus at Princeton University where he taught for almost 40 years.
During this time he directed CASTLE Lab which worked closely with industrial partners developing, testing and refining the tools needed to plan and manage complex freight transportation problems. This work spanned all modes, but truckload trucking was the problem that introduced him to the challenge of making decisions in the presence of all the different types of uncertainties that are familiar to the truckload industry.
The most difficult challenge was developing tools for making *decisions* in the presence of different forms of *uncertainty*. The academic community did not have tools that would scale to the settings needed in freight transportation. Over the course of his career, he was able to crack this rich problem class with tools that are practical, scalable and yet rigorous.
He created a new field that is called *sequential decision analytics*. For readers who want to learn more about the concepts and methods of this field, we recommend the video: A Universal Framework for Sequential Decision Analytics. For more information, the webpage https://tinyurl.com/sdalinks/ contains links to books, videos, webpages, and courses.
With these posts, Warren will describe how it can be used for problems in trucking and supply chain management. The target audience will be managers who have to understand how this new technology applies to real-world business decisions. In addition to providing powerful tools, this framework helps people *think* about complex, dynamic problems.
Look for the posts that start with “ Talking #decisionanalytics for #trucking and #supplychainmanagement” … stay tuned!
Read Part 1: "Learning How to Think About Complex Problems" Right Now.
