Operational Freight Carrier Planning

The modern freight carrier business requires a sophisticated automatic decision support in order to ensure the efficiency and reliability and therefore the survival of transport service providers. This book addresses these challenges and provides generic decision models for the short-term operations planning as well as advanced metaheuristics to obtain efficient operation plans. After a thorough analysis of the operations planning in the freight carrier business, decision models are derived. Their suitability is proven within a large number of numerical experiments, in which a new class of hybrid genetic search approaches demonstrate their appropriateness. TOC:Transport in Freight Carrier Networks.- Operational Freight Transport Planning.- Pickup and Delivery Selection Problems.- Memetic Algorithms.- Memetic Algorithm Vehicle Routing.- Memetic Search for Optimal PD-Schedules.- Coping with Compulsory Requests.- Request Selection and Collaborative Planning.- Conclusions.