Customized transportation service design for railway express delivery

The concept of mass customization has received considerable attention in the research literature in recent years. However, the existing research is limited in understanding of mass customization strategies and largely focuses on manufacturing operations. This paper focuses on the customized transportation service design problem for railway express delivery to satisfy increasing individual demand in transportation time limit. To address this problem, this paper develops a linear programming model and proposes a two-stage approach for solving this problem. Through computational testing, we explore the efficiency of this solution approach.