A distributed dispatching method for the brokerage of truckload freights

A distributed dispatching method is suggested, which can be applied to brokerage systems for truckload freights. A mathematical model is formulated for the dispatching problem. It is shown that the problem can be decomposed into a master problem and multiple sub-problems by the Lagrangean relaxation. It is also shown that the subgradient optimization procedure can be applied to the distributed dispatching framework. The effects of various practical considerations on the performance of the suggested dispatching method are tested numerically. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.