Decomposition Techniques for Urban Consolidation Problems

Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Publication Date

8-2015

Abstract

Less-than-truckload delivery is known to be a source of inefficiency in last-mile logistics leading to high transport costs, environmental pollution, traffic jam, particularly in urban settings. An Urban Consolidation Center (UCC) provides a platform to consolidate freights from various sources before delivering into the city. The operations of UCCs consist of 2 interrelated phases, consolidating freights and scheduling trucks into the city center. This problem is computationally challenging because of large urban freight volumes, which prohibits optimal solutions of conventional integer programming models to be found efficiently. In this paper, we propose two novel decomposition schemes: a vertical decomposition based on dynamic programming can achieve optimal consolidation for the single-period problem, and the horizontal decomposition based on a Lagrangian Relaxation can achieve good approximate solution for the multi-period problem. The combination of these two decompositions yield a real-time approach for large-scale problems.

Keywords

Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Scheduling and Optimization

Discipline

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Computer Sciences | Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering | Transportation

Research Areas

Intelligent Systems and Optimization

Publication

2015 IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE): August 24-28, 2015, Gothenburg, Sweden: Proceedings

First Page

57

Last Page

62

Identifier

10.1109/CoASE.2015.7294041

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/CoASE.2015.7294041

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