Design-balanced capacitated multicommodity network design with heterogeneous assets

Management of assets plays an essential role in determination of service plans operated by carriers in the transportation and logistics system. In this paper, we introduce certain issues related to management of heterogeneous assets in the well-known design-balanced capacitated multicommodity network design, where design-balanced requirements are explicitly defined based on heterogeneous assets. Taking vehicles as an example of heterogeneous assets, we first present an arc-based formulation for the proposed problem and discuss two associated subproblems. We then propose a tabu search based metaheuristic for this problem. Over a wide range of network design instances, we respectively compare our approach with CPLEX with one-hour and ten-hour time limits. Computational results demonstrate that the proposed approach performs very well in terms of solution quality and computing time, especially for large instances. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.