a b s t r a c tThis paper describes industrial aspects of combined inventory management and routing in maritime and road-based transportation, and gives a classification and comprehensive literature review of the current state of the research.The literature is contrasted with aspects of industrial applications from a constructive, but critical, viewpoint. Based on the status and trends within the field, future research is suggested with regard to both further development of the research area and industrial needs. By highlighting the industrial aspects, practitioners will hopefully see the benefit of using advanced decision support systems in complex situations related to combined inventory management and routing in their business. In addition, a classification and presentation of the research should help and motivate researchers to further focus on inventory management and routing challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to describe industrial aspects of combined fleet composition and routing in maritime and road-based transportation, and to present the current status of research in the form of a comprehensive literature review. With a backdrop of industrial aspects, a categorized survey of relevant literature since the first published papers in the 1950's is given. First, the literature review discusses some early seminal and application-oriented papers, presents a classification of problems, and then focuses on a basic definition of combined fleet composition and routing: the fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem. Three basic mathematical formulations from the literature are presented and compared. Further, the literature of extended and related problems is described and categorized. Surveys of application oriented research in road-based and maritime transportation conclude the review. Finally, we contrast the literature with aspects of industrial applications from a critical, but constructive stance. Major issues for future work are suggested.

No abstract

This paper considers the time-dependent service network design problem with stochastic demand represented by scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to address real life-size instances of this problem. The model integrates the balancing of empty vehicles, the cost of handling freight in intermediate terminals, the costs associated with moving freight using the selected services, and the penalty costs of not being able to deliver freight. A metaheuristic is presented and computational results are reported on a set of large new problem instances.

Traveling Salesman Problem, Pickup and Delivery, Tabu Search, Lasso Solutions,