Planning of Container Crossdocking for an Express Shipment Service Network

In air transportation, container crossdocking refers to a loaded container that is transferred at an airport from an incoming flight to an outgoing flight without handling the freight on the container. It reduces handling time and handling cost relative to unloading the container and sorting the freight, and is an economical alternative if a sufficient … Read more

Planning the City Operations of a Parcel Express Company

We introduce an interesting and challenging routing and scheduling problem arising in the city operations of SF Express, a large package express carrier in China. Vehicles execute multiple trips during a planning horizon spanning multiple shifts, where a trip can involve deliveries only, pickups only, or deliveries followed by pickups. Complicating factors include split deliveries … Read more

Service Network Design for Same-Day Delivery with Hub Capacity Constraints

We study a new service network design problem for an urban same-day delivery system in which the number of vehicles that can simultaneously load or unload at a hub is limited. Due to the presence of both time constraints for the commodities and capacity constraints at the hubs, it is no longer guaranteed that a … Read more