SHIPMENT COMPOSITION ENHANCEMENT AT A CONSOLIDATION CENTER

This paper examines ways in which loads should be made up to achieve as large a reduction in vehicle-miles as possible. The paper first considers a building block in which items are sent directly from one origin to one destination, and then analyzes a terminal serving many origins and one destination. The understanding developed from the building block leads to a linear programming formulation of the load make-up/routing problem that arises with many origins. The paper also presents a decomposition principle, and a matching algorithm that can be used to solve the problem in the important special case when vehicles can carry many items. The algorithm has a simple physical interpretation and does not require much data. It can be implemented by hand, or in an inexpensive computer.