A Solution Algorithm for Long Haul Freight Network Design Using Shipper-Carrier Freight Flow Prediction with Explicit Capacity Constraints

Freight transportation has long been recognized as an important foundation of economic strength. Previous studies use traditional methods to examine a set of scenarios. However, due to the complexity of transportation projects which can have substitution effects in a network the number of resulting scenarios may be more than can be examined on a case by case basis. In this paper, a sequential shipper-carrier freight flow prediction model is examined. Additionally, an explicit capacity constraint is used to divert the traffic volume from congested links. A branch and bound method is applied to obtain a solution to our model. We discuss the benefits and limitations of our method, examine its computational efficiency and provide a numerical example. The results show that project selection by the traditional case by case analysis method cannot capture the complexity of freight transportation network improvements and yields the sub-optimal solution.