Vehicle and Commodity Flow Synchronization

Network freight flow consolidation organizes the commodity flow with special attention to the minimization of the flow costs but the efficiency of transport resources is not addressed. In contrast, vehicle routing targets primarily the maximization of the efficiency of transport resources but the commodity-related preferences are treated as inferior requirements. This article is about the problem of synchronizing simultaneously the use of vehicles, and the flow of commodities in a given transport network. Section 2 introduces the investigated scenario. Section 3 proposes a multi-commodity network flow model for the representation of the flow synchronization problem and Section 4 presents results from numerical experiments.