Solution Methods for Service Network Design with Resource Management Consideration

Resource management in freight transportation service network design is an important issue that has been studied extensively in recent years. Resources such as vehicles, crews, etc. are factors that can not be ignored when designing a feasible plan for any service network design problem. However, contributions related to resource management issues and service network design are still limited. The goal of the thesis is to fill this gap by taking into account service network design problems with resource management issues. In this thesis, we propose and address three service network design problems that consider resource management. In the first study, we consider the capacitated multi-commodity fixed cost network design with design-balance constraints which is a basic sub-problem for many service design problems because of the capacitated multi-commodity structure as well as its design-balance property. We propose a three-phase matheuristic that combines tabu-search, path-relinking and an exactbased intensification procedure to find high quality solutions. Tabu-search identifies feasible solutions while path-relinking extends the set of feasible solutions. The solutions found by these two meta-heuristics are used to fix arcs as open or close. An exact solver intensifies the search on a restricted problem derived from fixing arcs. The experiments on benchmark instances show that the solution approach finds good solutions to large-scale problems in a reasonable amount of time. The contribution with regard to this study has been accepted in the Journal of Heuristics. In the second study, together with the consideration of the design of routes to transport a set of commodities by vehicles, we extend resources management by explicitly taking account of the number of available vehicles at each terminal. We introduce a matheuristic solution framework based on a cycle-based formulation that includes column generation, slope-scaling, heuristic and exact optimization techniques. As far as we know, this is the first matheuristic procedure developed for a cycle-based formulation. The column generation solves the linear relaxation model and provides a set of cycles to define the approximation model used in slopescaling loop. A heuristic is used to convert each solution to the approximation problem into a feasible solution. Memory-based perturbation procedure is used to enhance the performance of the algorithm. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm is able to find good feasible solutions for the problem. The contribution with regard to this study has been accepted for publication in Transportation Science. In the third study, we examine resources allocation issues in service network design. We aim to address a number of fleet utilization issues which usually appear at the beginning of the season because of the change of demand patterns: 1) reposition resources among terminals to account for shifts in demand patterns; 2) acquire (buy or long-term rent) new resources and as sign them to terminals; 3) outsource particular services. We present an integrated formulation combining these selection-location and scheduled service design decisions. The mixed-integer formulation is defined over a time-space network, the initial period modeling the location de cisions on resource acquisition and positioning, while the decisions on service selection and scheduling, resource assignment and cycling routing, and demand satisfaction being modeled on the rest of the network. We also present a matheuristic solution method combining slope scaling and column generation, discuss its algorithmic performance, and explore the impact of combining the location and design decisions in the context of consolidation carrier service design. This study will be presented at XII International Symposium On Locational Deci sion, in conjunction with the XXI Meeting of EURO Working Group on Locational Analysis, Naples/Capri (Italy), 2014. In summary, three studies are considered in this thesis. The first one considers the capaciated multi-commodity fixed cost network design with design-balance constraints, a basic problem in many service network design problems with design-balance constraints. We propose an ef ficient three-phase matheuristic solution method that includes tabu search, path relinking and exact optimization. In the second study, we propose a new service network design model that takes into account resources limitations at each terminal. We also propose an advanced matheuristic framework solution method based on a cycle-based formulation which includes slope-scaling, column generation, heuristics and exact optimization for this problem. The last study addresses resources allocation issues in service network design. We introduce formula tions that model the reposition, acquisition/renting of resources and outsourcing of services. A solution framework based on the slope-scaling approach on cycle-based formulations is pro posed. Tests indicate that these proposed algorithms are able to find good feasible solutions for each of threse problems.

Keyphrases: Transport de marchandises, slope-scaling, Freight transportation, service network design, asset management, cycle-based formulations, meta-heuristics, exact algorithm, tabu search, path-relinking, slope-scaling, column generation