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2015 | Buch

Operational Transportation Planning of Modern Freight Forwarding Companies

Vehicle Routing under Consideration of Subcontracting and Request Exchange

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Modern freight forwarding companies attempt to cooperate with each other to increase their efficiency. Xin Wang studies the new operational transportation planning problems that arise in the context of cooperation in both static and dynamic scenarios. To achieve the cost-savings embedded in cooperation, novel planning approaches that can help forwarders obtaining high-quality solutions are proposed. Computational studies show considerable benefits that can be achieved through cooperation.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter
1. Introduction
Abstract
The increasing pressure on modern freight forwarding companies to improve profitability as a result of ever-changing conditions and fierce competition on the transportation market has strongly influenced their fleet management and transportation planning strategies. In order to utilize transportation resources more efficiently, it is no longer sufficient for freight forwarders to optimize the usage of their internal resources, but they also have to improve the management of external relations with other carriers to exploit more costsaving potential embedded in cooperation.
Xin Wang
2. Vehicle Routing
Abstract
In Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, the basic decision problems in the operational transportation planning of freight forwarding companies are introduced. If own disposable vehicles are used for the request fulfillment, the forwarders have to solve the vehicle routing and scheduling problems. The requests have to be assigned to different trucks, and for each truck, the order of the visits at the customer nodes assigned to this truck has to be specifed. This topic is discussed in this chapter. The focus of the discussion lies in the PDP, which is considered as the basic routing problem for the study of the transportation planning in the context of IOTP and CTP in later chapters.
Xin Wang
3. Freight Consolidation
Abstract
In this chapter, the second type of the basic decision problems in the operational transportation planning of freight forwarding companies is discussed. Besides the possibility of disposing vehicles for the fulfillment of customer requests, forwarders can also transfer some requests to common carriers. In this case, the forwarders do not have to create any routing plan for the common carriers but just pay the freight charges calculated for every O-D pair based on predefined tariff structure.
Xin Wang
4. From Cherry-Picking to Integrated Operational Transportation Planning
Abstract
The increasing pressure on modern freight forwarding companies to improve profitability have strongly affected their fleet management and transportation planning strategies for the fulfillment of customer transportation requests. In order to reduce the overall operational costs and to maintain a very high utilization grade of the own transportation resources, freight forwarders need not only optimize their internal processes, but also consider external capacities from other carriers in their operational planning.
Xin Wang
5. Solution approaches for the integrated operational transportation planning problem
Abstract
The IOTPP introduced in Chapter 4 for LTL pickup and delivery requests with time windows extends the classical PDPTW by different modes of subcontracting and represents a complicated combinatorial optimization problem. Specifically, the heterogeneity of the vehicles in the IOTPP attributes mainly to the different cost structures of the fulfillment modes rather than to the physical specifications of the trucks.
Xin Wang
6. Collaborative transportation planning
Abstract
Freight forwarders are confronted with increasing pressures to improve profitability, while it is diffcult to further reduce operational costs. This problem is even more serious for those who already have almost exhausted their internal potential by processing optimization and applying new technologies including modern telecommunication equipment as well as powerful planning software.
Xin Wang
7. A route-based request exchange mechanism for the collaborative transportation planning
Abstract
In this chapter, the route-based request exchange mechanism proposed by Wang and Kopfer (2014) to solve the collaborative routing problem of horizontal coalitions of independent freight forwarding companies introduced in the last chapter is described. In the scenario studied in this chapter, both the own capacity and those of the members in horizontal coalitions are considered. The main challenges of our design are to ensure that exchanged bundles can be exactly evaluated, to guarantee the protection of private information, and to deal with the difficulties caused by introducing capacity restrictions.
Xin Wang
8. Collaborative integrated operational transportation planning
Abstract
Cooperation in transportation logistics offers freight forwarding companies new possibilities to increase the flexibility of their capacity and to reduce their operational costs. Such cooperation can happen between freight forwarders with subcontractors in vertical cooperation which is discussed in the IOTP in Chapters 4 and 5, or also between forwarders with equal partnership in a horizontal coalition as the case studied in Chapters 6 and 7.
Xin Wang
9. Dynamic collaborative transportation planning
Abstract
Through using efficient collaborative planning approaches and exchanging requests with other coalition members, freight forwarding companies can reduce their operational costs to a great extent as shown in the previous chapters in the static planning scenarios. In this chapter, using CTP for cost reduction in a dynamic environment is investigated. Compared to the static CTP problems, the performance of using CTP for dynamic planning has rarely been studied in literature yet.
Xin Wang
10. Computational study on the dynamic collaborative transportation planning
Abstract
In this chapter, a comprehensive computational study including several tests is conducted to obtain some insights into the dynamic CTP. Specifically, the tests are designed to answer the following three questions: Firstly, how much cost-saving potential can be realized by using the approaches proposed in Chapter 9. Secondly, how the overall planning results are influenced by different factors such as planning strategies and characteristics of the instances. Last but not least, how the realized cost-savings through CTP against IP are affected by these factors.
Xin Wang
11. Conclusions and future research
Abstract
In this thesis, the operational transportation planning of modern freight forwarding companies is studied. The motivation of this study is that the forwarders are confronted with increasing pressure to increase their operational efficiency of request fulfillment while the internal cost-saving potential is almost exhausted. A further cost reduction can be realized by taking advantage of the synergy effect embedded in cooperation with other forwarders. The extended spectrum of options for request fulfillment offered by cooperation results in more complicated optimization problems in the operational transportation planning. The purpose of the research in this thesis is to develop efficient solution approaches that can help forwarders master the high complexity of these planning problems in the new situation.
Xin Wang
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
Operational Transportation Planning of Modern Freight Forwarding Companies
verfasst von
Xin Wang
Copyright-Jahr
2015
Electronic ISBN
978-3-658-06869-1
Print ISBN
978-3-658-06868-4
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-06869-1