The shortest path problem is one of the most fundamental problems in operations research, which determines the shortest path between a source and a destination in a transportation network. Efficient algorithms dealing with this problem are well developed. However, they are mainly for solving shortest path networks with deterministic arc costs, which may not be applicable in many freight transportation networks. In reality, due to uncertainty events such as random shipment arrivals, travel times in these networks are random variables, whose probability distributions can be estimated through historical data. In this thesis, we study the routing of shipments in a transportation network where the arc costs are random variables which can be dependent. We propose an adaptive routing strategy...[ Read more ]

The shortest path problem is one of the most fundamental problems in operations research, which determines the shortest path between a source and a destination in a transportation network. Efficient algorithms dealing with this problem are well developed. However, they are mainly for solving shortest path networks with deterministic arc costs, which may not be applicable in many freight transportation networks. In reality, due to uncertainty events such as random shipment arrivals, travel times in these networks are random variables, whose probability distributions can be estimated through historical data. In this thesis, we study the routing of shipments in a transportation network where the arc costs are random variables which can be dependent. We propose an adaptive routing strategy in which the route choice is made adaptively based on the real-time information of the whole network. Our routing strategy is able to capture the dependency of the random arc costs and interaction between shipment flows. By using a simulation model, we performed numerical experiments to evaluate the performance of the adaptive routing strategy, and the results show that our adaptive routing strategy has better performance than both the classical shortest path method and the original dynamic routing method.