Time sensitive supply chains, urban congestion and a sharp increase in the availability of technologies to support information intensive real-time fleet and freight management systems has recently led to significant interest in the research community in studying these problems.
This talk presents an overview of some of the key problems in this field and then discusses one problem, that of managing local truckload pickup and delivery drivers, in depth. A solution approach that mixes global optimization with local techniques to modify assignments in real-time is presented. Trade-offs between on-line and off-line solution approaches are examined.