The Resource Assignment Problem

This Master’s thesis deals with the Resource Assignment Problem (RAP). This problemis not yet treated in literature. It is encountered in ORTEC TD, a software package for transportation planning. The RAP involves the allocation of a set of transportation trips to a number of available resources, mainly trucks, drivers and trailers. The objective is to minimize total costs, while complying with several constraints, such as driving time legislation and time windows. For this problem, the trip assignment method is developed by ORTEC, based on column generation. Furthermore, we developed a more extensive version of this method, which is capable of assigning the individual sections of which the trips consists. We therefore refer to this method as the section assignment method. The implementation of the trip assignmentmethod in ORTEC TD is tested using a case from practice, proving its capability to produce usable results within acceptable time. To compare this method with the section assignment method, both methods are also implemented in MATLAB and applied to instances of different size. This reveals that in most cases, the more complicated section assignment method can be used to obtain a better solution value, especially in small- and medium-sized instances. However, computation times for this method are significantly higher. It is therefore concluded that the section assignment method is the most useful when the problem size is not too large, or available time is ample. For very large instances as well as for situations in which a rough estimate is needed within a limited amount of time, the less complicated trip assignment method is the better choice.