Location–routing and synchronization problems in city logistics

Date

2020

Author

Farham, Mohammad Saleh

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City logistics aims to improve urban freight transportation by considering the costs and benefits of public and private sectors, consolidating segmented freight shipments, and integrating the individual actors in a collaborative environment. This thesis studies network design problems in city logistics systems to address managerial challenges in urban freight transportation. We consider two network design schemes, namely the one and the two-echelon distribution networks, to formulate strategic and tactical level problems in urban freight transportation. In the single-echelon systems, freight is distributed from consolidation centers located on city boundaries to the customers inside the city. In the two-echelon systems, goods are unloaded at the intermediate facilities, called satellites, and consolidated into smaller vehicles suitable for the last-mile delivery in city centers. From an operational level perspective, we highlight the importance of synchronizing first and second echelon vehicles at the satellite locations and discuss the relation of the satellite synchronization problem to the network design problems. We propose mathematical programming formulations for the introduced strategic, tactical, and operational level problems in city logistics, and develop exact and heuristic solution approaches. The exact approaches use column generation to find optimal delivery routes efficiently. The heuristics are based on the hierarchical decomposition of the original problem into its basic decisions. Extensive computational studies in this thesis provide new insights into designing and implementing a practical city logistics system in real-world.

Subject Keywords

Logistics., Urban freight transportation systems, Location-routing problem with timewindows, Decomposition, Branch-and-price, Constrained clustering

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12625395/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/45488

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis