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

This study focuses on investigating the tactical planning of an integrated multi-stakeholder system in which revenue management concepts including shipper categories, demand classification, penalty costs for demand satisfaction outside of prescribed time-windows, and offering services with bundles are addressed. The aim of the tactical planning in this system is to design the demand and supply sides of this integrated system simultaneously. To this end, a scheduled service network design formulation on a space-time network is developed to build a transportation plan by selecting profitable requests from non-contract shippers, selecting a subset of individual and bundled transportation scheduled services, and identifying the itineraries of the shipments on the selected service network with the objective of maximizing the profit of the system. Using realistic-size instances, an extensive computational analysis is performed on the split and unsplit shipment-flow versions of the problem. The aim of the analysis is twofold: 1) assess the computational effort required to solve the developed optimization model and 2) investigate the structural characteristics of the obtained tactical plans for different system settings.(c) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.