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We address a planning problem faced by logistics service providers who transport freight over long distances. Given a set of transportation requests, where the origin and the destination of each request are located far apart from each other, a logistics service provider must find feasible vehicle routes to fulfil those requests at minimum cost. When transporting freight over long distances, multimodal transportation provides a viable alternative to traditional unimodal road transportation. We introduce this new problem, which we call the multimodal long haul routing problem (MMLHRP), and present a mathematical formulation for it. Furthermore, we propose a matheuristic, using iterated local search within a column generation framework, for solving the MMLHRP. Results show that large cost savings can be achieved through multimodal transportation compared to unimodal road transportation.
Wolfinger et al. (Wed,) studied this question.