A Transportation Problem with Uncertain Truck Times and Unit Costs

Motivated by the emergency scheduling in a transportation network, this paper considers a transportation problem, in which, the truck times and transportation costs are assumed as uncertain variables. To meet the demand in the practi-cal applications, two optimization objectives are considered, one is the total costs and another is the completion times. And then, a multi-objective optimization model is developed according to the situation in applications. Because there are commensurability and conflicting between the two objectives commonly, a solution does not necessarily exist that is best with respective to the two objectives. Therefore, the problem is reduced to a single objective model, which is an uncertain programming with a chance-constrain. After some analysis, its equivalent deterministic form is obtained, which is a nonlinear programming. Based on a stepwise optimization strategy, a solution method is developed to solve the problem. Finally, the computational results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and algorithm