Capacity Planning and Allocation for Agile Corridor Freight Transportation Services

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Cost and environmentally-efficient fast, reliable, on-time delivery of goods to firms, institutions, and privatecitizens, is the yardstick by which success, prosperity, and growth, is measured or failure, stagnation anddecline down to bankruptcy, is experienced by the firms involved. Fierce competition and increasing pressurefrom customers and governments alike for greener and less energy-hungry activities further increases the stresson the transportation/distribution industry. New concepts, based on collaboration and resource sharing, appearpromising but raise significant challenges in terms of, e.g., business models and intelligent decision-supportmethods. This project is the first stage of a major effort aiming to address these challenges. ClearDestination isan innovative, well-established, and successful company within the home-delivery industry. It currentlydevelops an innovative business model for the long-distance market, which requires equally innovativeplanning methods. Significant time-dependent uncertainty in supply and demand characterizes the problem andmakes it very difficult to address. We bring internationally-acknowledged experience and expertise in keyaspects of the project: advanced models and methods for the design and planning of multimodal transportationand logistics systems, deterministic and stochastic combinatorial optimization, including network design andvehicle routing, and technology transfer. The problem identified for this first project targets the corridor setting,i.e., the case of two cities linked by a multimodal network of carrier services. The goal is to define andcharacterize the planning problems in this setting, develop the operations research models and solutionmethods to address them, analyze their behaviour under various industrial settings, and transfer this newtechnology for a first deployment. The results of the project will provide the means for ClearDestination toconsolidate its market share and improve profitability. It will also yield a triple-win situation, to suppliers(additional revenue), shippers (decreased delivery costs), and the society would benefit from less vehicles onthe road and less pollution due to consolidation of different shipments in the same vehicles.