SANDRA ZAJAC, SANDRA HUBER: TRANSPORATION PLANNING WITH MULTIPLE OBJECTIVES AT DIFFERENT DECISION LEVELS
ABSTRACT
Moving people, goods and information efficiently is crucial for a successful business. Often, total
distance travelled is used to evaluate the quality of a transportation plan. Next to the routing, other
decisions can also have an impact on this criterion. In location routing problems, for example, the
decision where to locate facilities influences the total distance travelled to customers. The impact of
the facility locations on the routing is used to evaluate the location decisions at the strategic or tactical
level. At these decision levels, it is not reasonable to take account for rush hours and traffic jams.
However, these aspects can significantly influence the optimal routing decisions at the operational
level. Depending on the application and the decision level, multiple conflicting criteria are suitable to
evaluate a transportation plan in practice. In this paper, selected transportation problems at different
decision levels are investigated regarding their pursued goals, their measurement, and the chosen
solution method to cope with multiple objectives. The analysis shows an increasing importance of
environmental objectives and customer costs in decision making problems, that are commonly solved
using multi-objective evolutionary algorithms.