The annual dairy transportation problem involves designing the routes that collect milk from farms and deliver it to processing plants. The demands of these plants can change from one week to the next, but the collection is fixed by contract and must remain the same throughout the year. While the routes are currently designed using the historical average demand from the plants, we show that inc...

The dairy transportation problem (DTP) consists of determining the best routes to be performed for collecting milk from farms and delivering it to processing plants. We study the particular case of the province of Quebec, where the Fédération des producteurs de lait du Québec is responsible for negotiating the transportation costs on behalf of producers. Several issues are highlighted in the ac...

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has identified the four phases of disaster related planning as mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery. The recovery phase is characterized by activity to return life to normal or improved levels. Very little research considers the recovery phase, which encompasses restoring services and rebuilding disaster stricken areas of the highway tra...

Public-transportation route-planning systems typically work as follows. The user specifies a source and a target location, as well as a departure time. The system then returns one or more optimal trips at or after that departure time. In this paper, we consider guidebook routing, where the goal is to provide timeindependent answers that are valid over long periods of time. An example answer cou...

The current crisis in the global economy and the stiff competition has led many firms to recognize the importance of managing their logistic network for organizational effectiveness, improved customer value, better utilization of resources, and increased profitability. The logistics business in Spain continues rising mainly by the new electronics market. In 2008 the turnover of logistics activi...

This paper reports on the development of an innovative agent-mediated electronic marketplace, which is able to efficiently handle transportation transactions of various types. Software agents of the proposed system represent and act for any user involved in a transportation scenario, while they cooperate and get the related information in real-time mode. Our overall approach aims at the develop...

The purpose of multi-modal route planners is to provide the user with the optimal route between trip start and destination, where the route may utilize several transportation modes including public transportation. The optimal route is defined over a set of evaluation criteria considered by the user during the route selection process. Especially in the case of multi-modal transportation, numerou...

Most transportation-related applications are developed for privately-owned cars. Some recent ones are devoted to public transportation, they show limitations in dealing with the following aspects: (i) people who use public transportation may change transportation means not only within the same type but also among different modes such as between buses and subways and (ii) the system should take ...

The author examines methods for a special class of path planning problems in which the routes are constrained. General search algorithms assume that we can move around in the traffic network freely, so they extend the partial paths from the very last location to each of its neighbors to form more partial paths. The best partial paths are then selected to expand, unless the selected partial path...