The integrated operational transportation planning problem with compulsory requests

Abstract

Demand fluctuations and high fixed costs force freight forwarders to consider the integrated operational transportation planning problem, which consists in the combined usage of own transportation resources (self-fulfillment) and external carriers (subcontracting) for the fulfillment of requests. For high quality goods or because of reliability and trustiness, customers prohibit subcontracting for some of their requests (compulsory requests). In this paper we present an approach for solving the integrated problem in case of the existence of compulsory requests. The presented approach is based on an adaptive large neighborhood search and on a column generation procedure. By means of this approach we quantify the increase of fulfillment costs which is caused by different kinds of compulsiveness of transportation requests. A first benchmark study shows that our heuristic approach for the integrated problem with compulsion outperforms the only approach found in literature for that problem, and therefore justifies the investigation of our main study with 6960 test instances. In our main study more realistic and extended instances are used, which gives us the possibility to consider the impact of different kinds of compulsory requests.