Long Haul Trucks Dynamic Assignment with Penalties

Long haul transportation system operational planning implies to solve a capacitated dynamic network optimization problem, aiming to perform the freight movements in an efficient and effective way, utilizing the available transportation capacity. This work employs an approximate adaptive dynamic programming to solve this kind of problem, introducing a network modeling to manage demands not attended, with the payment of penalties, or the utilization of third parties transportation firms to avoid the payment of such penalties. The proposed methodology employs a dynamic programming model applied to each stage of the problem instead of a network global optimization procedure. A heuristic is used to estimate the value of future state functions transferred from a current stage to future ones. This technique greatly reduces the quantity of involved variables, allowing the utilization of more realistic mathematical models on a longer planning horizon. Results from a successful application of the model with the utilization of the Jensen Network Solver are presented.