Optimization of transportation problem in dynamic logistics network

Purpose – finding an optimal or efficient path is an essential components for the design and operation of smart transportation or logistics network. Many applications in navigation system assume that travel time of each link is fixed and same all over time. However, in practice, the travel times of each link change over time. In this paper, we introduce a new transportation problem that is to find a latest departing time and a transportation path between two nodes while not violating the appointed time at the destination node. Research design, data, and methodology – to solve our problem, we suggest an optimization models based on network theory and an algorithm based on backward search. Results – first, we introduce our problem and show that the computational complexity of our problem belongs to NP-Complete meaning that it is difficult to find an optimal solution for large-sized network. Second, we propose an efficient heuristic method based on backward search to solve our problem in large-sized network. Conclusions – we have proposed a new transportation problem which is different with traditional shortest path problem or minimum cost path problem. We have analyzed our problem under conditions that travel time is changing with time and proposed an algorithms to solve them. Extending our models for visiting two or more destinations is one of the further research topics.