A decomposition approach for optimizing truck trips for a single carrier

This paper proposes a heuristic decomposition approach for scheduling truck trips with the goal of satisfying the demand of a container single carrier while minimizing its costs. The approach foresees three phases: a pre-processing step, in which the demand is decomposed in two parts and a set of rules for combining trips are defined, and two optimization phases. The first mixed linear integer optimization model allows to combine trips two by two in order to decrease the number of empty or partially empty trips, while the second optimization problem enables assigning trucks to trips with the goal of minimizing travel costs. The efficiency of the proposed methodology is analyzed using a real simple case over a local network and the results are presented.