Air Products and Chemicals posed us with a challenging resource scheduling problem: how to deliver product to a customer when we have to figure out which driver, which tractor, which trailer, where to get the right type of product, and finally, when to deliver to the customer.
This is called resource layering. All of our problems involve some level of resource layering, but the chemical distribution problem is perhaps the hardest we have seen. Research into this problem will help us in other projects.a