Cargo consolidation and distribution in urban areas. A branch-and-price approach to a less-than-truckload -like consolidation and distribution problem.

DONDO, RODOLFO

Montevideo

Workshop; VIII ALIO/EURO Workshop on. Applied Combinatorial Optimization.; 2014

Universidad de la República

The less-than-truckload (LTL) modality convey a number of transportation-requests from the origin locations to their destinations while minimizing the total movements-cost by using the possibility of goods-transshipments on the carriers terminals-network. In this way logistics companies are required to consolidate shipments from different suppliers in the outbound vehicles at a terminal of the carrier terminals-network. We present a methodology for finding near-optimal solutions to a LTL shipping modality used for cargo consolidation and distribution in urban areas. This by using column generation combined with an incomplete branch-and-price procedure. We also present results on a real case study.