Reinforcement Learning-Driven Intelligent Truck Dispatching Algorithms for Freeway Logistics

Abstract

Freeway logistics plays a pivotal role in economic development. Although the rapid development in big data and artificial intelligence motivates long-haul freeway logistics towards informatization and intellectualization, the transportation of bulk commodities still faces serious challenges arisen from dispersed freight demands and the lack of co-ordination among different operators. The present study thereby proposed intelligent algorithms for truck dispatching for freeway logistics. Specifically, our contributions include the establishment of mathematical models for full-truckload (FTL) and less-than-truckload (LTL) transportation modes, respectively, and the introduction of reinforcement learning with deep Q-networks tailored for each transportation mode to improve the decision-making in order acceptance and truck repositioning. Simulation experiments based on the real-world freeway logistics data collected in Guiyang, China show that our algorithms improved operational profitability substantially with a 76% and 30% revenue increase for FTL and LTL modes, respectively, compared with single-stage optimization. These results demonstrate the potential of reinforcement learning in revolutionizing freeway logistics and should lay a foundation for future research in intelligent logistics systems.

Keywords

• full-truckload
• less-than-truckload
• truck dispatch
• reposition
• reinforcement learning