Modeling and optimization of pickup and delivery problem using constraint logic programming

Abstract

Our research was conducted in a project that aims to develop an intelligent freight broker agent for providing logistics brokerage services for the efficient allocation of transport resources (vehicles or trucks) to the transport applications. This agent coordinates transportation arrangements of customers (usually shippers and consignees) with resource providers or carriers, following the freight broker business model. The scheduling function of the freight broker agent was formulated as a special type of vehicle routing with pickup and delivery problem. This research is based on our recently proposed declarative model of the freight broker agent using constraint logic programming. This model allows the computation of the feasible transportation schedules. In this paper we augment this model with a declarative representation of optimal schedules and then we show how these optimal schedules can be computed using the ECLiPSe constraint logic programming system.