Consolidation in a Multicommodity Network

This paper studies a multicommodity logistic network. The decisions at the strategic level are supposed to be already taken, so the number and the location of the different sites, the products to be manufactured or stored on each site, the volumes of the flows exchanged between sites and the transportation modes to use are known. Then, our purpose is to improve the global cost of the network by aggregating the orders. In this article we consider an initial solution which specifies for each order the origin and the destination points, the delivery frequency and the quantities to be delivered on each shipment. Then we propose a descent algorithm for generation and evaluation of new solutions by transport consolidations