This book represents the compilation of several research approaches on opera tional freight carrier planning carried out at the Chair of Logistics, University of Bremen. In addition, I have to thank Prof. On behalf of all my colleagues, who supported me in numerous ways, I have to say thank you to Prof. Dr. Christian Bierwirth, Henner Gratz, Prof.
The modern freight carrier business requires a sophisticated automatic decision support in order to ensure the efficiency and reliability and therefore the survival of transport service providers. This book addresses these challenges and provides generic decision models for the short-term operations planning as well as advanced metaheuristics to obtain efficient operation plans. After a thorough analysis of the operations planning in the freight carrier business, decision models are derived. Their suitability is proven within a large number of numerical experiments, in which a new class of hybrid genetic search approaches demonstrate their appropriateness.