Article ID: | iaor20164857 |
Volume: | 50 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 1380 |
End Page Number: | 1393 |
Publication Date: | Nov 2016 |
Journal: | Transportation Science |
Authors: | Crainic Teodor Gabriel, Toulouse Michel, Hewitt Mike, Vu Duc Minh |
Keywords: | design, transportation: general, vehicle routing & scheduling, allocation: resources, combinatorial optimization |
We first present a new service network design model for freight consolidation carriers, one that selects services and routes both commodities and resources needed to support the services that transport them, while explicitly recognizing that there are limits on how many resources are available at each terminal. We next present a solution approach that combines column generation, meta‐heuristic, and exact optimization techniques to produce high‐quality solutions. We demonstrate the efficacy of the approach with an extensive computational study and benchmark its performance against both a leading commercial solver and a column generation‐based heuristic.