A working model of interactive evolution for workload partitioning. The mail example follows the field process described in the Accord slides for La Poste; the scoring of the nurse example follows Funes, Bonabeau, Hervé and Morieux, “Interactive Multi-Participant Tour Allocation” (CEC 2004).
Rank 1 is the version they would most like to get. Nobody rates a whole plan.
Each dot is one plan shown to participants. Lines join the plans of a round that no other plan beats on both goals, labeled with the round number. Lower left is better.
One column per round, best-ranked plan on top. Filled circles were parents of the next round.
Summarized from the Accord slides. The slides state three objectives for a reorganization: capture the appropriate level of productivity, reduce the risk of rejection at scale by winning carrier engagement, and be robust enough to be industrialized.
Postal and map data are entered. Atomic groups are defined with carriers and first-line managers, which is where hard constraints and local knowledge enter: a dead end, a one-way street, a village that cannot be split, an uphill stretch that should stay with its downhill half.
A scenario fixes work regimes, indoor and outdoor work, and transport modes. The optimizer generates many partitions built from atomic groups, and filters remove those outside management limits.
Each morning every carrier receives six versions of their own route and ranks them. The two best partitions overall seed the next set through direct transmission, mutation and recombination.
The top three partitions go to a vote of all carriers at the office. The winner is printed as route sheets and maps.