Capacity Planning and Allocation for Agile Corridor Freight Transportation Services

成本和环境效率，快速，可靠，准时的货物交付到公司，机构和私人，是衡量成功，繁荣和增长的标准，或失败，停滞和衰退，直至破产，是相关公司所经历的。激烈的竞争以及来自客户和政府对更环保、更节能活动的日益增长的压力进一步增加了运输/分销行业的压力。基于协作和资源共享的新概念看起来很有希望，但在商业模型和智能决策支持方法等方面提出了重大挑战。该项目是旨在应对这些挑战的重大努力的第一阶段。ClearDestination是一家创新的、成熟的、成功的送货上门公司。它目前正在为长途市场开发一种创新的商业模式，这需要同样创新的规划方法。供应和需求中显著的时间依赖性不确定性是这个问题的特征，并使其很难解决。我们在项目的关键方面带来了国际公认的经验和专业知识：多式联运和物流系统设计和规划的先进模型和方法，确定性和随机组合优化，包括网络设计和车辆路线，以及技术转让。第一个项目确定的问题是走廊设置，即。在美国，两个城市通过承运人服务的多式联运网络连接在一起。目标是定义和描述这种环境下的规划问题，开发运筹学模型和解决方案方法来解决这些问题，分析它们在各种工业环境下的行为，并将这项新技术用于首次部署。该项目的结果将为ClearDestination提供巩固其市场份额和提高盈利能力的手段。这也将产生一个三赢的局面，供应商（额外收入），托运人（降低运输成本），社会将受益于道路上的车辆减少和污染减少，因为不同的货物整合在同一辆车上。

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.