複合運輸的路徑與併裝決策模式

Abstract

海運承攬運送業者 (Ocean Freight Forwarder)提供符合托運人需求且及時並經濟的複合運輸 (Intermodal Transportation)服務，為達到顧客需求，其必須為托運貨物做出適當的路徑與併裝決策，同時達到最小化自身所承擔之成本。 本研究致力於輔助海運承攬運送業者的複合運輸作業決策，首先，本研究發展出一套以海運承攬運送業者為角度，提供散貨貨物併裝與路徑之整數規劃模式，此外，為了可以運用在實務當中托運貨物數量較大的狀況，故本研究發展出一套近似演算法，以利在有限時間內求出理想的可行解。 數值測試中的例題是基於一家台灣領先業界之海運承攬運送業者實務操作資料進行設計，根據數值測試結果，本研究所提出之近似演算法在兩個不同大小之例題皆可以在短時間內求解出相當好的可行解，且在貨物數目較多時，近似演算法求解成效更為出色且穩定，故基於近似演算法之求解成效，本研究發展出之求解方法可以成為海運承攬運送業者輔助決策系統的核心。

Ocean freight forwarders provide the intermodal transportation services, which fit the needs of many shippers in a timely and economical way. Given the customer demand to be met, they must make proper routing and consolidation decisions for the collected cargo items so as to achieve the goal of cost minimization. This study focuses on the decision support of ocean freight forwarders for intermodal operation. First of all, an integer programming (IP) model is developed to derive the optimal solution of the integrated routing and consolidation problem. In addition, in order to handle the large-scale problems from the field operation, an approximation algorithm is further developed to derive an acceptable solution within a short period of time. The test problems in the numerical experiment are designed based on the real operational data from one leading freight forwarder in Taiwan. According to the test results, the approximation algorithm developed in this study can generate fairly good solutions for the test instances with two problem sizes. In particular, for the large-size instances, the solution quality is even better. It is believed that, based on the effectiveness of the approximate algorithm, the developed solution approach is promising for serving as the core of the decision support system for ocean freight forwarders.