Online Transportation and Logistics using Computationally Intelligent Anticipation

With advances in technology in communication and navigation, the ability to make decisions online (i.e. as time goes by) becomes increasingly important in transportation and logistics. In this Chapter, we focus on online decision making in these areas. First, we point out the importance of anticipation when optimizing decision processes online. Anticipation is the possibility to take into account future events and the influence of decisions taken now on those future events. Second, we discuss how computational intelligence (CI) can be used to design approaches that perform anticipation. We illustrate this particular use of CI techniques in two different applications: dynamic vehicle routing (transportation) and inventory management (logistics). In both cases the use of anticipation is found to lead to substantial improvements. This demonstrates our main conclusion that the ability to perform anticipation in online transportation and logistics is very important.