Multimodal Express Package Delivery: A Service Network Design Application
The focus of this research is to model and solve a large-scale service network design problem involving express package delivery. The objective is to find the cost minimizing movement of packages from their origins to their destinations, given very tight service windows, limited package sort capacity, and a finite number of ground vehicles and aircraft. We have developed a model for large scale transportation service network design problems with time windows. With the use of route-based decision variables, we capture complex cost structures and operating regulations and policies. The poor linear programming bounds limit our ability to solve the problem, so we strengthen our linear programming relaxation by adding valid inequalities. By exploiting problem structure using a specialized network representation and applying a series of novel problem reduction methods, we achieve dramatic decreases in problem size without compromising optimality of the model. Our solution optimization approach synthesizes column and row generation optimization techniques and heuristics to generate solutions to an express package delivery application containing hundreds of thousands of constraints and billions of variables, using only a small fraction of the constraint matrix. The results are potential savings in annual operating costs of tens of millions of dollars, reductions in the fleet size required, dramatic decreases in the time required to develop operating plans, and scenario analysis capabilities for planners and analysts. Through this and additional computational experiments, we conclude that, although state-of-the-art integer programming methods can work well for relatively small, uncongested service network design problems, they must be used in concert with heuristics to be effective for large-scale, congested problems encountered in practice.
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- Service network design in freight transportation
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- A GRASP with adaptive large neighborhood search for pickup and delivery problems with transshipment
- LTL logistics networks with differentiated services
- Network design formulations for scheduling U.S. air force channel route missions
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- Integrated express shipment service network design with customer choice and endogenous delivery time restrictions
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- The single-node dynamic service scheduling and dispatching problem
- Optimizing package express operations in China
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- Colored-edge graph approach for the modeling of multimodal transportation systems
- Extension and Application of a General Pickup and Delivery Model for Evaluating the Impact of Bundling Goods in an Urban Environment
- Robust Branch-Cut-and-Price Algorithms for Vehicle Routing Problems
- A novel modeling approach for express package carrier planning
- Air Network Design for Express Shipment Service
- Composite Variable Formulations for Express Shipment Service Network Design
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- Network Design with Service Requirements: Scaling-up the Size of Solvable Problems
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- Service Design Models for Rail Intermodel Transportation
- Network design for express shipment delivery
- An exact algorithm for the service network design problem with hub capacity constraints
- Electric vehicle-based express service network design with recharging management: a branch-and-price approach
- Service time and pricing decisions in online retailing with drop-shipping and guaranteed service framework
- A hybrid algorithm for large-scale service network design considering a heterogeneous fleet
- A metaheuristic for stochastic service network design
- The multiple depot, multiple traveling salesmen facility-location problem: Vehicle range, service frequency, and heuristic implementations
- Hub location for time definite transportation
- Design of the federal express large package sort facility
- Intra market optimization for express package carriers with station to station travel and proportional sorting
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