Tactical capacity planning in an integrated multi-stakeholder freight transportation system
Résumé
This study focuses on investigating tactical planning of an integrated multi-stakeholder system. The system receives time-dependent requests from carriers and shippers and optimizes in time and space the operations and transportation activities through consolidation of loads of different shippers into the same vehicles and synchronization of activities. The aim of tactical planning in this system is to build an efficient service network and schedule to satisfy the regular demand and requirements of shippers by making use of the predicted services and their capacities offered by the carriers. The decisions to be made are to select the transportation services offered by carriers, schedule the services that will operate, select the shipper-demand requests to move, identify the demand itineraries, and find the terminals where the shipments need to be stored temporarily with the objective of maximizing the profitability of the system. A novel mathematical formulation of the problem is introduced. Extensive computational analysis is performed on the split and unsplit shipment-flow versions of the problem to evaluate the solution potential of the proposed model with emphasis on the effect of the choice of parameters.