Branch and Price for Service Network Design with Asset Management Constraints

  • Authors:

  • Jardar Andersen;Marielle Christiansen;Teodor Gabriel Crainic;Roar Grønhaug

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway, and Institute of Transport Economics, 0349 Oslo, Norway;Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway;École des Sciences de la Gestion, Univ. du Québec á Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada, and Interuniversity Research Centre on Entreprise Networks, Logistics and Tran ...;Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway

  • Venue:
  • Transportation Science
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We address the service network design problem with asset management considerations for consolidation-based freight carriers. Given a set of demands to be transported from origins to destinations and a set of transshipment facilities, the objective is to select services and their schedules, build routes for the assets (vehicles) operating these scheduled services, and move the demands (commodities) through the resulting service network as efficiently as possible. We propose a first branch-and-price framework for the mixed-integer formulation of the problem with integer cycle design and continuous flow-path variables. The proposed method includes particular column generation subproblems for dynamically constructing these cycles and paths, as well as an acceleration technique to identify integer solutions rapidly. The computational study shows that the proposed method finds better solutions for large network instances than reported previously.