Navy Version of Expedia Could Save DoD Millions 55
Nerval's Lobster writes "The U.S. Navy expects to save $20 million per year on its global logistics and transportation budget, thanks to technology that has been saving business travelers billions since 1996. The Navy is testing a system that consolidates information about freight and personnel travel schedules into a single database—the better to give individual decision-makers a choice of the quickest, cheapest options available using 'an Expedia-like' search capability, according to the Office of Naval Research, which developed the application. All that being said, the Transportation Exploitation Tool (TET) is a little more sophisticated than online-travel sites such as Expedia or Travelocity were in 1996: The system consolidates travel schedules and capacity reports for both military and civilian carriers to give logistics planners a choice of open spaces in ships, planes, trucks, trains or other means of travel, along with information about cost, estimated time of arrival and recommendations of the most efficient route. Previously, logistics planners trying to get an engine part to a Navy ship stranded in a foreign port, for example, might spend hours or days looking through separate databases to find a ship or plane able to carry the part that could deliver it within a limited window of time. 'This system is truly revolutionary,' Bob Smith, program manager at the Office of Naval Research (ONR), wrote in a statement announcing the system. 'TET uses advances in technology to provide outstanding optimization of available flights and ship routes, saving our logisticians enormous amounts of time—and that can literally mean saving lives.'"
Definitions (Score:5, Insightful)
"'This system is truly revolutionary,' Bob Smith, program manager at the Office of Naval Research (ONR), wrote"
"Revolutionary". I don't think that word means what they think it means considering "thanks to technology that has been saving business travelers billions since 1996"
Seems like it would be evolutionary at best.
not sure Expedia is the best analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
Airfares are a strange market, selling a particular segmented product, and trying to maximize the profit on it. Logistics optimization when you own the network, on the other hand, is a different, and well-studied problem. The closest analogy is probably to shipping: someone like Maersk has pretty good software optimizing their shipping routes and determining which containers should go on which ships, and which ships should take which routes to which ports.