Design of decision support system for road freight transportation routing using multilayer zero one goal programming

Abstract

The objective of this study was to develop a decision support system (DSS) to select the optimal road freight transportation route. This DSS is a proactive road freight transportation routing system which employs the standard criteria from the road freight transportation route’s physical characteristics for potential evaluation. The descriptions of potential scale were derived by the Delphi method based on accommodation of transportation. Moreover, the DSS can also calculate the relative weights of the decision criteria by Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP). Multilayer Zero One Goal Programming (MZOGP) is used as an optimization algorithm to select road freight transportation routes. The operation of this algorithm is to calculate the total deviation from three objectives: cost, time and, the deviation of road freight transportation route’s physical characteristic score which is calculated by comparing the route’s physical characteristic potential score with potential scores from users. The approach was tested on a realistic road freight transportation routing operation of a logistics service provider company. The empirical study showed that this DSS works successfully.