Appeal No. 2002-0086 Page 2
Application No. 09/053,880
medical appointments, shopping, and community centers. A fleet of vehicles must
provide service under constraints such as honoring a requested pickup time, dropping
the customer off no more than sixty minutes before his appointment, and planning for
slower travel speed during rush hours. (Id.)
Transportation scheduling takes a collection of trip requests as its "subgoals"
and a fleet of vehicles as its resources. The scheduling constructs a "trip manifest" for
each vehicle. The trip manifest is an ordered sequence of stop events. Each event has
an associated location (either pickup or dropoff) and an assigned time. (Id.)
Accordingly, the appellant's invention schedules trips using vehicles, each
vehicle having a trip manifest. A matrix that delimits which of the vehicles is usable with
which of the trips is first generated. Next, a best trip of the trips to be scheduled is
determined. A best vehicle from the set of vehicles for accommodating the best trip is
then resolved. A best insertion pair comprising the best vehicle for the best trip is
determined. An appropriate trip manifest is updated to include the best insertion pair.
Finally, the matrix is updated to reflect the scheduling of the best trip to the best vehicle.
The preceding steps are repeated until all the trips have been scheduled. (Id., abs.)
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