Large-Scale, Less-than-Truckload Service Network Design

Authors:
Ahmad I. Jarrah;Ellis Johnson;Lucas C. Neubert
Affiliations:
Department of Decision Sciences, School of Business, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052;School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332;J. B. Hunt, Lowell, Arkansas 72745
Venue:
Operations Research
Year:
2009

Citing 13
Cited 2

Design and implementation of an interactive optimization system for network design in the motor carrier industry

Operations Research
Bundle-based relaxation methods for multicommodity capacitated fixed charge network design

Discrete Applied Mathematics - Special issue on the combinatorial optimization symposium
Network Design for Express Shipment Delivery

Computational Optimization and Applications
Cooperative Parallel Tabu Search for Capacitated Network Design

Journal of Heuristics
Lagrangian Cardinality Cuts and Variable Fixing for Capacitated Network Design

ESA '02 Proceedings of the 10th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms
Multimodal Express Package Delivery: a Service Network Design Application

Transportation Science
Railroad Blocking: A Network Design Application

Operations Research
A Simplex-Based Tabu Search Method for Capacitated Network Design

INFORMS Journal on Computing
Cycle-Based Neighbourhoods for Fixed-Charge Capacitated Multicommodity Network Design

Operations Research
A Lagrangian Heuristic Based Branch-and-Bound Approach for the Capacitated Network Design Problem

Operations Research
A Slope Scaling/Lagrangean Perturbation Heuristic with Long-Term Memory for Multicommodity Capacitated Fixed-Charge Network Design

Journal of Heuristics
Exact solution of multicommodity network optimization problems with general step cost functions

Operations Research Letters
A solution approach to the fixed charge network flow problem using a dynamic slope scaling procedure

Operations Research Letters

Creating schedules and computing operating costs for LTL load plans

Computers and Operations Research
Improved Load Plan Design Through Integer Programming Based Local Search

Transportation Science

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We present a novel formulation for the service network design problem in the context of large-scale, less-than-truckload (LTL) freight operations. The formulation captures the basic network design constraints; the load-planning requirement that all freight at a location, irrespective of the freight's origin, loads to the same next terminal; and other important LTL-specific requirements. Our modeling scheme fragments the underlying massive network design model with up to 1.3 million 0--1 variables and 1.3 million rows into a separate and efficient integer programming (IP) problem for each destination terminal along with a coordinating master network design problem. We produce high-quality solutions in very reasonable CPU times (∼2 hours) using slope scaling and load-planning tree generation with corresponding potential annual savings of $20--25 million dollars for the target company for which the research was conducted.