This paper studies a robust maritime inventory routing problem with time windows and stochastic travel times. One of the novelties of the problem is that the length and placement of the time windows are also decision variables. Such problems arise in the design and negotiation of long-term delivery contracts with customers who require on-time deliveries … Read more
Consolidation carriers transport shipments that are small relative to trailer capacity. To be cost-effective, the carrier must consolidate shipments, which requires coordinating their paths in both space and time, i.e., the carrier must solve a Service Network Design problem. Most service network design models rely on discretization of time, i.e., instead of determining the exact … Read more
The usability of hub location models heavily depends on an appropriate modelling approach for the economies of scale. Realistic hub location models require more sophisticated transport cost structures than the traditional flow-independent discount. We develop a general modelling scheme for such problems allowing the definition of complicated (non-linear) costs and constraints; its structure allows an … Read more
In this study, we propose exact solution methods for the Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem (SDVRP). We first give a new vehicle-indexed flow formulation for the problem, and then, a relaxation obtained by aggregating the vehicle-indexed variables over all vehicles. This relaxation may have optimal solutions where several vehicles exchange loads at some customers. We … Read more
We introduce, discuss, and solve a hard practical optimization problem which we call the ship traffic control problem (STCP). Since we plan bi-directional traffic, STCP relates to, and in fact generalizes train timetabling on single-track networks. The objective of finding quickest routes motivates the integration of recent algorithmic ideas from dynamic collision-free routing of automated … Read more
This article studies a multi-period capacitated fixed-charge location-transportation problem in which, while the location and capacity of each facility need to be determined immediately, the determination of final production and distribution of products can be delayed until actual orders are received in each period. In contexts where little is known about future demand, robust optimization, … Read more
To facilitate fast solution of deterministic dynamic programming problems, we present a parameter-free variation of the Sampled Fictitious Play (SFP) algorithm. Its random tie-braking procedure imparts a natural randomness to the algorithm which prevents it from “getting stuck” at a local optimal solution and allows the discovery of an optimal path in a finite number … Read more
An integer programming model for the truck dock assignment problem with operational time constraint within cross docks has been proposed in (Miao, Z.,Lim, A.,Ma, H., 2009. Truck dock assignment problem with operational time constraint within crossdocks. European Journal of Operational Research 192 (1), 105–115). We address the following issues in this formulation: 1) from among … Read more
The recent research on the CVRP is being slowed down by the lack of a good set of benchmark instances. The existing sets suff er from at least one of the following drawbacks: (i) became too easy for current algorithms; (ii) are too arti cial; (iii) are too homogeneous, not covering the wide range of characteristics found … Read more
The main contributions of this thesis are the comparison of existing and the design of new exact approaches based on linear, quadratic and semidefinite relaxations for row layout problems and several applications in logistic. In particular we demonstrate that our suggested semidefinite approach is the strongest exact method to date for most row layout problems. … Read more