MULTIMODAL EXPRESS SHIPMENT SERVICE DESIGN - MODELS AND ALGORITHMS

The research objective is to develop models and algorithms to provide quality solutions for large-scale service design problems. Service des ign problems arising at railroads, airlines, trucking firms, intermoda l partnerships, etc. require the determination of the cost minimizing or profit maximizing set of services and their schedules, given limite d resources and service requirements. The model is applied to a large express shipment transportation problem involving over 1.3 billion dec ision variables and 200,000 constraints. We develop a new model and so lution approach -branch-and-price-and-cut. Computational results show that near optimal solution is achieved within a reasonable run time us ing novel problem reduction methods involving node consolidation, Link consolidation, derived schedules and a branch-and-price-and-cut solut ion procedure. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.