MIP neighborhood search heuristics for a service network design problem with design-balanced requirements

Service network design problems are used to address a variety of services in transportation and logistics planning. In the present paper, we consider the service network design problem with design-balanced requirements. This problem is particularly relevant to operations for consolidation transportation systems and determines the transportation network configuration and the characteristics of the corresponding services. We present a solution approach that combines a capacity scaling procedure for finding an initial feasible solution and a MIP neighborhood search for improving the solutions. Computational experiments on benchmark instances show that the proposed heuristic finds high-quality solutions in a short computation time.