Operational Freight Carrier Planning

This book represents the compilation of several research approaches on opera tional freight carrier planning carried out at the Chair of Logistics, University of Bremen. It took nearly three years from the first ideas to the final version, now in your hands. During this time, several persons helped me all the time to keep on going and to re-start when I got stuck in a dead end or when I could not see the wood for the trees. I am deeply indebted to them for their encouragement and comments. Prof. Dr. Herbert Kopfer, holder of the Chair of Logistics, introduced me into the field of operational transport planning. He motivated and supervised me. Furthermore, he supported me constantly and allowed me to be as free as possible in my research and encouraged me to be as creative as necessary. In addition, I have to thank Prof. Dr. Hans-Dietrich Haasis, Prof. Dr. Martin G. Mohrle and Prof. Dr. Thorsten Poddig. On behalf of all my colleagues, who supported me in numerous ways, I have to say thank you to Prof. Dr. Dirk C. Mattfeld, Prof. Dr. Christian Bierwirth, Henner Gratz, Prof. Dr. Elmar Erkens, Nadja Shigo and Katrin Dorow. They all helped me even with my most obscure and dubious problems. My family supported me all the time. They always showed me their trust and encouraged me continuously. Special thanks are dedicated to my parents Monika and Heinz-Jiirgen.

Presents new research results in the area of transportation, especially on freight carrier business Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Klappentext

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.

Inhalt
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.