A Flow Rationing Strategy over Multiple Flow Classes on Restricted Paths

With the trend of globalization and increasing transportation volume, integrated automated shipment handling systems have appeared in major cargo terminals. In such terminals, a critical decision is the route selection linking various origins (such as system gate points) and destinations (such as storage racks). We study such a routing optimization problem and propose a flow rationing routing strategy, which reserves various sets of paths for corresponding cargos and only admits the cargos with less importance on more important paths only when their saturability is low. A Markov Decision Processes model is developed to make the decision on the admission policy. Extensive numerical experiment is conducted to prove the effectiveness of the routing strategy our proposed.