A comprehensive approach to planning the deployment of transportation assets in distributing forest products

Four different modes for transporting wood in the first three stages of the wood supply chain are introduced and compared for real-life-based test cases under various scenarios. They include log-trucks and (foldable) containers. Freight forwarders are employed by sawmills to perform the transports. Their profit is dependent on the used transport mode and the bargained revenue function, which includes different prices for full travel and empty travel times. Tabu search-based algorithms were developed and implemented to solve the emerging vehicle routing and combined vehicle routing and container scheduling problems. The obtained results specify costs and profits of the particular transport technologies and support freight forwarders in their choice of transport mode. It can be concluded that the use of foldable containers could improve the efficiency of transport in wood supply chains considerably.