Revenue Management for Transportation Problems

In this paper, we consider the problem of managing a fleet of trucks with different capacity to serve the requests of different customers that arise randomly over time. Customers make a request by demanding the transportation of a given quantity of goods from an origin to a destination, at a given time. It is well known that these problems arise in the dynamic resource allocation context, where tasks (requests of renting) arriving over time have to be covered by a set of indivisible and reusable resources of different types (trucks with different capacity). The assignment of a resource to a task removes the task from the system, modifies the resources and generates profit. We give a dynamic formulation of the problem. Due to the “curse of dimensionality” the dynamic model cannot be solved to optimality. Thus to provide a valuable support for the rental decision making process, we develop a linear programming version of the problem and exploit its solution via revenue management techniques.