Solving an integrated operational transportation planning problem with forwarding limitations

• A transportation planning problem with forwarding limitations is presented
• To solve the problem a modified column generation-based heuristic is applied
• New strategies are presented for handling forwarding limitations
• One of the extended versions of the heuristic outperforms all previous approaches
• The impact of forwarding limitations is analyzed by detailed computational studies

In integrated operational transportation planning (IOTP) problems, the traditional vehicle routing problem is extended by using external resources for the fulfillment of transportation requests. IOTP is getting more complex when the choice of the fulfillment mode is limited for some requests. In this paper, an existing column generation-based heuristic for IOTP is extended by two strategies for handling forwarding limitations. The computational experiments indicate that one of the extended versions of the heuristic outperforms all previous approaches in literature. Further on, the impact of forwarding limitations on different location structures and on the size of the private fleet is analyzed.