Freight Railroad Service Network Design

Tactical capacity planning in an integrated multi-stakeholder freight transportation system

“…Service network design problems have been extensively studied in the literature to address tactical planning issues for consolidation-based carries (Crainic 2000 andHewitt 2021). The reader may refer to reviews on this field for long-haul transportation by Crainic (2003), for rail by Cordeau et al (1998) and Chouman and Crainic (2021), for maritime by Christiansen et al (2007), and for intermodal transportation by Crainic and Kim (2007) and SteadieSeifi et al (2014). The aim of the classical SSND in the literature is to build a transportation plan by selecting the services and their schedules to satisfy the demand in the most-cost efficient way.…”

New formulations for the Scheduled Service Network Design Problem

“…In the United States the LTL industry was reported to be $46 billion in 2021 (Schulz 2021) while UPS reported $69.44 billion in revenue from its US and international small package operations in 2020 (UPS 2021). For every mode of transportation other than pipeline, one can find examples of carriers for whom the SSNDP is relevant (Barnhart and Schneur 1996, Bakir, Erera, and Savelsbergh 2021, Chouman and Crainic 2021, Christiansen et al 2021. Given the markets they serve, a key to the profitability of these carriers is the ability to consolidate multiple shipments into the same vehicle dispatch, increasing vehicle utilization and decreasing transportation costs.…”

A Layer-Based Relaxation Approach for Service Network Design

“…Therefore, while increasing the loading rate, choosing the optimal route and vehicle model minimizes the total cost while reducing carbon emissions and air pollution. Carriers must efficiently manage limited transportation assets that they own [4,5]. Researchers proposed models with solution methodologies that explicitly examine resource management issues in the context of SND [6,7].…”