A pickup and delivery selection problem with compulsory requests in an activity-based transportation framework

Abstract

In an activity-based transportation framework the decisions of agents are simulated to predict future freight flows. One of these agents is the carrier who daily receives multiple transport requests. In order to optimize his profit he has the liberty to refuse transport requests which are not profitable. However, a number of clients cannot be refused because of long-term contracts. The received transport requests consist of paired pickup and delivery locations and orders are less-than-truckload. A tabu-embedded simulated annealing algorithm is developed to solve the problem.