A heuristic approach to long-haul freight transportation with multiple objective functions

This paper studies a long-haul freight transportation problem stimulated by a reallife application, whose underlying vehicle routing problem is a multi-objective one where travel time and route cost are to be minimized together with the maximization of a transportation mean sharing index, related to the capability of the transportation system of generating economy scale solutions. In terms of constraints, besides vehicle capacity and time windows, transportation jobs have to obey additional constraints related to mandatory nodes (e.g., the logistic platform nearest to the origin or to destination) and forbidden nodes (e.g., the logistic platforms not agreeable with the operations required). Based on the network definition, routes can be multimodal. For this problem, we propose a heuristic algorithm working on both the tactical and the operational phase, and present the results of an extensive experimentation.