SOLVING REAL-LIFE TRANSPORTATION SCHEDULING PROBLEMS By JIAN LIU A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy SOLVING REAL-LIFE TRANSPORTATION SCHEDULING PROBLEMS By Jian Liu August, 2003 Chair: Dr. Ravindra K. Ahuja Major Department: Industrial and Systems Engineering Transportation by railroads and airlines contains a rich set of optimization problems with substantial potential savings in transportation costs. In the past few decades, unfortunately, optimization models were not widely used in transportation industries, because of (i) the large size and tremendous complexity of these problems, (ii) the lack of suitable algorithmic approaches for solving them, and (iii) insufficient computing power available. However, as major advances have taken place in algorithm design, analysis and implementation, complemented by enhanced computer systems, transportation scheduling problems now appear to be tractable. The goal of this dissertation is to study several real-life transportation scheduling problems that are of great importance for railroads and airlines. The related literatures of these problems have only dealt with simplified models or small instances failing to incorporate the characteristic of real-life applications. In Chapter 2, we present an integrated model for the locomotive scheduling problem. In Chapter 3, we propose two approaches to solve the railroad blocking problem. In Chapters 4 and 5, we study