@article{boland2017the,
author = {Boland, Natashia and Hewitt, Mike and Marshall, Luke and Savelsbergh, Martin},
title = {The continuous-time service network design problem},
year = {2017},
month = {July},
abstract = {Consolidation carriers transport shipments that are small relative to trailer capacity. To be cost-effective, the carrier must consolidate shipments, which requires coordinating their paths in both space and time, i.e., the carrier must solve a Service Network Design problem. Most service network design models rely on discretization of time, i.e., instead of determining the exact time at which a dispatch should occur, the model determines a time interval during which a dispatch should occur. While the use of time discretization is widespread in service network design models, a fundamental question related to its use has never been answered: “Is it possible to produce an optimal continuous time solution without explicitly modeling eachpoint in time?” We answer this question in the affirmative. We develop an iterative refinement algorithm using partially time-expanded networks that solves continuous time service network design problems. An extensive computational study demonstrates that the algorithm is not only of theoretical interest, but also performs well in practice.},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/the-continuous-time-service-network-design-problem/},
pages = {1303-1321},
journal = {Operations Research},
volume = {65},
number = {5},
note = {Winner of the 2018 Best Paper in Transportation Science & Logistics},
}