A neural network approach to the vehicle dispatching problem

Summary form only given. Decision making with respect to the dispatching of vehicles and crews is still mainly in the realm of human expertise. On the basis of their own experience, the authors suggest that it seems very difficult to explicitly model that expertise via a symbolic approach. They thus propose an alternative neural network model as a subsymbolic and empirical alternative for modeling the decision process of expert dispatchers. Preliminary results on the ability of the network to reproduce systematic decision rules were obtained