The vehicle routing and scheduling problem has been studied with much interest within the last four decades. In this paper, some of the existing literature dealing with routing and scheduling problems with environmental issues is reviewed, and a description is provided of the problems that have been investigated and how they are treated using combinatorial optimization tools.
This study focuses on one of the intermodal operational issues: how to select best routes for shipments through the international intermodal network. International intermodal routing is complicated by three important characteristics: (1) multiple objectives; (2) scheduled transportation modes and demanded delivery times; and (3) transportation economies of scale. In this paper, the international intermodal routing problem is formulated as a multiobjective multimodal multicommodity flow problem (MMMFP) with time windows and concave costs. The objectives of this paper are to develop a mathematical model encompassing all three essential characteristics, and to propose an algorithm that can effectively provide answers to the model. The problem is NP-hard. It follows that the proposed algorithm is a heuristic. Based on relaxation and decomposition techniques, the original problem is broken into a set of smaller and easier subproblems. The case studies show that it is important to incorporate the three characteristics into the international intermodal routing problem, and our proposed algorithm can effectively and efficiently solve the MMMFP with time windows and concave costs. Abstract Over the years, an increasing interdependence of the world economy has led to the considerable growth of international trade. Due to the lengthy distribution channel, international trade is often characterized by intermodal shipment which moves products across national boundaries via more than one mode of transportation. Consequently, the intermodal choice is of vital importance to the success of international trade. The intermodal choice, however, has never been a simple matter for any distribution manager because it can be affected by the multitude of conflicting factors such as cost, on-time service, and risk. This article develops a chance-constrained goal programming model to aid the distribution manager in choosing the most effective intermodal mix that not only minimizes cost and risk, but also satisfies various on-time service requirements. This paper studies a routing problem in a multimodal network with shipment consolidation options. A freight forwarder can use a mix of flexible-time and scheduled transportation services. Time windows are a prominent aspect of the problem. For instance, they are used to model opening hours of the terminals, as well as pickup and delivery time slots. The various features of the problem can be described as elements of a digraph and their integration leads to a holistic graph representation. This allows an origin- destination integer multi-commodity flow formulation with non-convex piecewise linear costs, time windows, and side constraints. Column generation algorithms are designed to compute lower bounds. These column generation algorithms are also embedded within heuristics aimed at finding feasible integer solutions. Computational results with real-life data are presented and show the efficacy of the proposed approach.