Study On The Multimodal Routing Optimization With Fuzzy Customer Demands

Under the background of economic globalization, the distributions of the resources, products and markets are expanded into the entire world. The optimal allocation of the resources and constantly expansive market are demanded by the enterprises, which proposes a great challenge for the freight system. To answer this challenge, an efficient integrated freight system should be established, and the essence of such system is to realize the connection and integration of various transportation modes. As an advanced means of transportation, multimodal transportation comprehensively combines the respective advantages of different transportation modes (railway, highway, waterway and airway) to satisfy the requirements of the integrated transportation system. Study on the multimodal routing problem aims at selecting the best routs to move the goods through the multimodal transportation network, by which the transportation cost can be lowered and the limited transportation resources can be saved, so that the performance of the multimodal transportation system can be remarkably improved.This study explores the multimodal routing problem with fuzzy demands. Following works are accomplished in it.(1) First of all, by analyzing the basic relative knowledge, the entire multimodal transportation process is illustrated and presented, which laid a solid theoretical foundation for solving the multimodal routing problem.(2) Then this study describes the formulation characteristics of the model formulation and gives the optimization objective of the problem. According to practical uncertain environment in the multimodal routing, this study further points out the uncertain factors that should be considered in dealing with this problem, and adopts fuzzy triangular numbers to describe them. At the end of this section, relative methods on fuzzy programming is introduced.(3) Next, this study constructs a multimodal routing model with fuzzy demands. Because the unclear definition of the objective function and constraints, chance-constrained programming and a crisp equivalent method is utilized to transform the initial model into its equivalent well-defined formulation that can be effectively solved by mathematical programming software Lingo.(4) Finally an empirical case study is designed to verify the feasibility of the proposed model and solution method. The result indicates that the proposed solution strategy shows good performance in dealing with the multimodal routing problem and can provides the decision makers with better decision support.