6533b7d1fe1ef96bd125ce40

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Branch-and-price-and-cut for a service network design and hub location problem

subject

description

In the context of combined road-rail freight transport, we study the integrated tactical planning of hub locations and the design of a frequency service network. We consider a number of real-world constraints such as multiple transshipments of requests at hubs, transport time limits for requests, request splitting, and outsourcing possibilities. To our knowledge, the combination of problem features we deal with has not been described before. We present a path-based model and solve it with a branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm. Computational experiments show that large realistic instances from a major German rail freight company can be solved close to optimality within one hour on a standard desktop computer, allowing our algorithm to be used for practical planning purposes.