Cross-board Motor Carrier Service Network Design With Territorial Restriction And Optional Demand

TIR,as the only global transit system established by IRU,streamlines procedures at borders,reducing the administrative burden for customs authorities and for transport and logistics companies.It cuts border waiting times significantly,saving time and money.June 2019,China has started to apply TIR and open all 1200 border ports which brings convenience for the companies working on international trades and cross-border transportations.This enlarges the cross-border freight market among China and countries and areas along the "the Belt and Road".Under the context,designing an advantageous and competitive freight service network based on original service network is the urgent problem faced with cross-border freight carriers.In research articles on service network design problem,there is few considering the features of cross-border road freight business.The paper from the perspective of crossborder carriers,based on the theories on service network design problem,study the model and algorithm for cross-border road freight service network design.Concretely,first,the paper clarifies the connotation of cross-border road freight service network design.Secondly,the paper defines the objective and requirements of cross-border road freight service network design after demonstrating the important concepts related with crossborder road freight including the computation of its cost and profit.Thirdly,the paper proposes the dynamic service network design model with optimization goal of maximizing profit and considering territorial restriction and optional demand.The function of the model is verified by a small instance.Fourthly,because the complexity of the model,the paper tailors the column generation and local search algorithm in order to solve the model when it is applied in large instances.The tailored heuristic algorithm performs better than the off-the-shell optimizer Gurobi both in the result and time used.Finally,taking the operation of B enterprise as an example,the paper analyzes the influence of the demand and pandemic regulation on the design results of the service network and concludes useful managerial insights.There are 23 figures,21 tables and 61 references.