Modelling carrier decisions in an activity-based freight transportation framework

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis was to develop a new freight transportation framework in which the focus lies on the logistic decisions taken by the involved actors. Two main topics can be recognized in this thesis. The first part of this thesis deals with understanding how current freight transportation models work and what their shortcomings are (chapter 2). Based on this analysis a new conceptual freight transportation framework is proposed to fill in the research gaps (chapters 3 and 4). Secondly, the operational decisions of a carrier are formulated as a pickup and delivery selection problem and solved by a heuristic algorithm (chapters 5 and 6). This problem is extended into several alternative problem settings in chapter 7. This final chapter summarizes the main conclusions and indicates opportunities for future research.