Exact and heuristic solution approaches for the bid construction problem in transportation procurement auctions with a heterogeneous fleet

This paper solves the bid construction problem (BCP) for heterogeneous truckload operations. Exact and heuristic solution methods are proposed to solve the BCP. The heuristic framework is based on a destroy-repair principle coupled with local search procedures. A heuristic variant integrating a post-optimization method considering solutions obtained during the heuristic search is also proposed. The exact approach uses CPLEX to solve an adapted arc-based mathematical formulation with our best heuristic solution as an initial solution. Computational results show that the proposed methods perform very well in terms of CPU time and solution quality for existing and new sets of instances.