Global synchromodal transport with dynamic and stochastic shipment matching

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Global synchromodal transport with dynamic and stochastic shipment matching

Guo, Wenjing / Atasoy, Bilge / van Blokland, Wouter Beelaerts / Negenborn, Rudy R.

Highlights • A global synchromodal transport network is considered. • A dynamic and stochastic model that integrates the decisions of acceptance and matching is developed. • The uncertainties in spot requests and travel times are considered simultaneously. • A hybrid stochastic approach is developed to address uncertainties. • The performance of the hybrid stochastic approach is evaluated under a comprehensive set of experiments.

Abstract This paper investigates a dynamic and stochastic shipment matching problem, in which a platform aims to provide online decisions on accepting or rejecting newly received shipment requests and decisions on shipment-to-service matches in global synchromodal transportation. The problem is considered dynamic since the platform receives requests and travel times continuously in real time. The problem is considered stochastic since the information of requests and travel times is not known with certainty. To solve the problem, we develop a rolling horizon framework to handle dynamic events, a hybrid stochastic approach to address uncertainties, and a preprocessing-based heuristic algorithm to generate timely solutions at each decision epoch. The experimental results indicate that for instances with above 50% degrees of dynamism, the hybrid stochastic approach that considers shipment request and travel time uncertainties simultaneously outperforms the approaches that do not consider any uncertainty or just consider one type of uncertainties in terms of total profits, the number of infeasible transshipments, and delay in deliveries.