Thecentralfocusofthisbookconsistsintheinclusionofnewimportant aspects of practical relevance, such as di?erent subcontraction pos- bilities and cooperative planning approaches to the operational tra- portation planning in the commercial road haulage. The book presents the concepts, models and algorithms for the e?ciency increase in the operational transportation planning that include the subcontracti- and collaborative planning concepts developed far beyond the state of the art. The derivation and application of these concepts results in the extension of the intensively investigated problems of vehicle routing and scheduling to the integrated operational transportation planning problem with several subcontraction forms and collaborative request execution. Even if the additional aspect of collaboration (which is itself of high complexity) is not considered, the full complexity of the operational transportation planning still remains insu?ciently investigated in the scienti?cliterature. Theauthorpresentsaninnovativeapproachincl- ing simultaneously several subcontraction forms, which - although of high practical importance - has not yet been discussed in literature. There exists no optimization software, not to mention a comprehensive Decision Support System, for the extended problem solved thousand fold daily in freight forwarding companies. On the basis of a real-life analysis an algorithm is developed by the author in order to solve this highly complex combinatorial optimization problem. The usage of the tabu search method seems reasonable. It allows adapting the latest methodical cognitions to the presented algorithm. Test series for the cost parameter variation of the di?erent transportation modes show promising results and recommendations for the aimed mixbetween self-ful?llment and subcontraction.

The freight forwarding market has become extremely demanding for the professional carriers in a road transport. Apart from decreasing prices and increasing competition, freight forwarders have to cope with the fact that demands fluctuate on a short-term basis and that fast adjustments to the constantly changing customer's needs are essential. From this perspective, searching for unexploited possibilities to optimize performance has proved to be an effective means to realize cost-saving targets and can make the difference between 'to be or not to be' for many freight forwarders.On the basis of an analysis conducted in a freight forwarding company, Marta Anna Krajewska identifies two levels of improving logistics performance. First, she demonstrates that on the local level the automated operational transportation planning increases the planning quality and influences mid- and long-term planning issues. Secondly, the results show that on the global level the proposed horizontal collaboration

Integrated operational transportation planning.- Integrated operational transportation planning in practice.- Integrated operational transportation planning in theory.- Integrated operational transportation planning in a profit centre.- Solving the integrated operational transportation planning problem.- Long-term issues for integrated operational transportation planning.- Collaborative planning.- Collaboration in practice.- Collaboration in theory.- Modeling collaboration of profit centers.- Verification of collaboration profitability.- Conclusions.