Abstract
Transportation networks are large scale complex systems spatially distributed whose objective is to deliver commodities at the agreed time and at the agreed location. These networks appear in different domain fields, such as communication, water distribution, traffic, logistics and transportation. A transportation network has at the macroscopic level storage capability (located in the nodes) and transport delay (along each connection) as main features. Operations management at transportation networks can be seen as a flow assignment problem. The problem dimension to solve grows exponentially with the number of existing commodities, nodes and connections. In this work we present a Hierarchical Model Predictive Control (H-MPC) architecture to determine flow assignments in transportation networks, while minimizing exogenous inputs effects. This approach has the capacity to keep track of commodity types while solving the flow assignment problem. A flow decomposition of the main system into subsystems is proposed to diminish the problem dimension to solve in each time step. Each subsystem is managed by a control agent. Control agents solve their problems in a hierarchical way, using a so-called push-pull flow perspective. Further problem dimension reduction is achieved using contracted projection sets. The framework proposed can be easily scaled to network topologies in which hundreds of commodities and connections are present.
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Notes
- 1.
European Gateway Services are a service provided by European Container Terminal (ECT) whose main objective is to create an integrated network of hinterland terminals cooperating to increase the ECT terminals throughput at the Rotterdam port. Neuss Trimodal has been a member of this network since 20 December 2011.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Portuguese Government, through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, under the project PTDC/EEACRO/102102/2008 - AQUANET, through IDMEC under LAETA and by the VENI project “Intelligent multi-agent control for flexible coordination of transport hubs” (project 11210) of the Dutch Technology Foundation STW, a subdivision of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
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Nabais, J.L., Negenborn, R.R., Carmona-Benítez, R.B., Mendonça, L.F., Botto, M.A. (2014). Hierarchical MPC for Multiple Commodity Transportation Networks. In: Maestre, J., Negenborn, R. (eds) Distributed Model Predictive Control Made Easy. Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering, vol 69. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7006-5_33
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