Researchers and public agencies have proposed consolidation policies as an alternative to increase truck payload utilization and mitigate externalities produced by freight transportation. Understanding and enhancing the economic mechanisms that lead to freight consolidation can ease the...

This paper addresses the towing process of airplanes as part of the turnaround process. We introduce a VRP based MIP model which assigns different types of towing tractors to jobs with specified service time windows. The objective function minimizes operating costs subject to operational...

The multi-commodity network flow problem is an important sub-problem in several heuristics and exact methods for designing route networks for container ships. The sub-problem decides how cargoes should be transported through the network provided by shipping routes. This paper studies the...

This paper investigates the Train Network Design Optimization problem arising from railroad industry which involves the integration of three inter-related decision sub-problems: train routing which is to identify origin, destination and itinerary for individual trains; block-to-train assignment...

This paper introduces the vehicle routing problem with soft time windows (VRPSTW) in which problem definition differs from ones previously defined in literature. Branch-and-price approach is employed, resulting in a set partitioning master problem and its new subproblem. Novel techniques are...

In the Generalized Bin Packing Problem (GBPP), given two sets of compulsory and non-compulsory items characterized by volume and profit and a set of bins with given volume and cost, we want to select the subset of profitable non-compulsory items to be loaded together with the compulsory ones...