A Transportation Problem with Uncertain Truck Times and Unit Costs

Motivated by the emergency scheduling in a transportation network, this paper considers a transportation problem, in which, the truck times and transportation costs are assumed as uncertain variables. To meet the demand in the practical applications, two optimization objectives are considered, one is the total costs and another is the completion times. And then, a multi-objective optimization model is developed according to the situation in applications. Because there are commensurability and conflicting between the two objectives commonly, a solution does not necessarily exist that is best with respective to the two objectives. Therefore, the problem is reduced to a single objective model, which is an uncertain programming with a chance-constrain. After some analysis, its equivalent deterministic form is obtained, which is a nonlinear programming. Based on a stepwise optimization strategy, a solution method is developed to solve the problem. Finally, the computational results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and algorithm.