An adaptive routing strategy for freight transportation networks

Abstract

We introduce an adaptive routing strategy (ARS) for transportation networks. In this strategy, the route choice is made adaptively based on the real-time information of the whole system. An efficient optimization-based heuristic is proposed to support such real-time decision-making process. Numerical results show that our ARS outperforms both the static routing method and the original dynamic routing method.

Keywords:

• dynamic routing
• material handling system
• stochastic approximation

Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China under Grants NSFC70802063, NSFC70801029, by Sun Yat-Sen University under Social Science Young Researcher Fund 0809025 and by the Guangdong Natural Science Fund Committee under Grant GNSF8451027501001466. This support is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also due to Cheung Yuk Wai and Gil Law for their help with programming. We are also grateful to the referees for their valuable comments.