Design and implementation of a decision support system for multistage investment in Chinese coal production and transportation

At present, coal production and transportation is the bottleneck in the drive to develop the Chinese economy. The multistage investment problem is formulated as a fixed charge transshipment problem with side constraints. By a special transformation, the problem can be solved via an equivalent 0-1 generalized network problem. Therefore, it can be solved quite efficiently. In implementing the 0-1 generalized network, a new heuristic method is used in selecting branch variables. The system is implemented and shown to be very efficient. The entire system is automatic and requires no manual intervention.