City logistics aims to reduce the nuisances associated to freight transportation in urban areas while supporting their economic and social development. The fundamental idea is to view individual stakeholders and decisions as components of an integrated logistics system. This implies the coordination of shippers, carriers, and movements as well as the consolidation of loads of several customers and carriers into the same environment-friendly vehicles. City logistics explicitly aims to optimize such advanced urban transportation systems. We focus on a challenging city logistics planning issue, the integrated short-term scheduling of operations and management of resources, for the general case involving a two-tiered distribution structure. We investigate the main issues related to the problem, introduce a new problem class, propose both a general model and formulations for the main system components, and identify promising solution avenues.
In this paper we review the dry port concept and its outfalls in terms of optimal design and management of freight distribution. Some optimization challenges arising from the presence of dry ports in intermodal freight transport systems are presented and discussed. Then we consider the tactical planning problem of defining the optimal routes and schedules for the fleet of vehicles providing transportation services between the terminals of a dry-port-based intermodal system. An original service network design model based on a mixed integer programming mathematical formulation is proposed to solve the considered problem. An experimental framework built upon realistic instances inspired by regional cases is described and the computational results of the model are presented and discussed
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