Operations Research 2025
Abstract Submission

147. An Arc-Based Dynamic Discretization Discovery Approach for the Service Network Design Problem

Invited abstract in session TD-1: Hub location and service network design, stream Mobility, Transportation, and Traffic.

Thursday, 14:30-16:00
Room: Audimax

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Alexander Helber
Chair of Operations Research, RWTH Aachen University

Abstract

Consolidation-based carriers transport shipments that are small compared to the capacity of the used vehicles. To enable cost-effective operations, they need to consolidate shipments. The Service Network Design Problem consists of determining the paths of shipments in the carriers network as well as the timing of the dispatches. Boland et al. (2017) proposed the Dynamic Discretization Discovery (DDD) framework to solve large scale instances of this problem to optimality by iteratively solving and refining a relaxed time-discretized model. We present a new relaxation for their DDD framework that uses an arc-based discretization of time and leads to significantly smaller models that can be solved faster. We also adapt some recent theoretical and algorithmic advances from the DDD literature to our relaxation. Computational experiments demonstrate that a DDD implementation based on our relaxation leads to models that are about five times smaller and solved twice as fast as those of a comparable node-based discretization approach for a hard set of instances from the literature.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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