Synchromodal transport planning with flexible services

Synchromodal transport planning with flexible services: Mathematical model and heuristic algorithm

Zhang, Y. (TU Delft Transport Engineering and Logistics)
Guo, W. (Wuhan University of Technology)
Negenborn, R.R. (TU Delft Transport Engineering and Logistics)
Atasoy, B. (TU Delft Transport Engineering and Logistics)

2022

As a critical feature of synchromodal transport (ST), service flexibility plays an important role in improving the utilization of resources to reduce costs, emissions, congestions, and delays. However, none of the existing studies considered flexible services under the framework of synchromodality. This paper develops a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model to formulate service flexibility in ST planning. In the MILP model, vehicles with flexible services as well as fixed services are both considered, and vehicle routes and request routes are planned simultaneously. Due to the computational complexity, an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search heuristic is designed to solve the problem. Several customized operators are designed based on the characteristics of the studied problem. The proposed model is compared with the models developed in a highly-cited paper and a newly published paper that do not consider service flexibility. Case studies on small instances verified that the proposed model with flexibility performs better on all scenarios, including scenarios with different weights for the individual objectives, scenarios under congestion, and dynamic optimization scenarios. On large instances (up to 1600 shipment requests), the proposed model with flexibility reduces the cost by 14% on average compared with the existing models in the literature.

Adaptive large neighborhood search
Flexibility
Mixed integer linear programming
Synchromodal transport planning

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:d20afc80-986c-4b92-b790-7f1fa4a5aac5

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trc.2022.103711

2022-11-24

0968-090X

Transportation Research. Part C: Emerging Technologies, 140

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2022 Y. Zhang, W. Guo, R.R. Negenborn, B. Atasoy