Operations research and goods transportation
Résumé
This chapter illustrates the richness of the transport applications of operations research. It target goods transport, of which the chapter presents a brief introduction, and it tackle a few sectors that are major both in their socio-economic importance and in the methodological developments with which they are associated. The chapter deals with some important design models of transport and logistics systems, whether they are deployed on a large or small scale. It devotes to tactical planning and operations problems of long-distance transporters. The chapter describes the principal models for these variants as well as the associated exact solution methods. It devotes to heuristic approaches. It concentrates on three main variants of the vehicle routing problem (VRP): the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP), the capacitated vehicle routing problem with length constraints (CVRPLC), and the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW)