Route-based transportation network design

Given shipment demand and driving regulations, a consolidation carrier has to make decisions on how to route both shipments and drivers at minimal cost. The traditional way to formulate and solve these problems is through the use of two-step models. This thesis presents a heuristic algorithm to solve an integrated model that can provide superior solutions. The algorithm combines a slope scaling initialization phase and tabu search to find high-quality solutions. The performance of the proposed heuristic is benchmarked against a commercial solver and these results indicate that the proposed method is able to produce better quality solutions for the similar solution time