Research on agent-based approaches to freight transport scheduling

In the last few years, the agent and agent-based technology have been researched and applied in a number of domains. However, the advantages and effectiveness are still under testing on freight transport scheduling. The aim of this paper is to examine the potential applicability of the agent-based technology to freight transport. The research started with literatures review, a real world experiment was then conducted by using an agent-based scheduling tool developed by Magenta. Two scenarios were tested in the experiments and the results were analyzed and evaluated by comparing with the actual operational performance. The results of the simple scenario were as good as the actual performance, while the complex scenario improved a lot. It is concluded from the study that there is an increasing trend and a number of positive aspects of the application of agent-based technology to the freight transport scheduling, the agent-based technology is suitable for solving the distributed, complex and volatile scheduling problems in the freight transport domain.