In today’s global free market, third-party logistics providers (3PLs) are becoming increasingly important. This paper studies a problem faced by a 3PL operating a warehouse in Shanghai, China, under contract with a major manufacturer of children’s clothing based in the United States. At the warehouse, the 3PL receives textile parcel shipments from the suppliers located in China; each shipment i...

Nowadays, in global free market, third-party logistics providers (3PLs) are becoming increasingly important. Hence, this study aims to develop the freight consolidation and containerization problem, which consists of loading items into containers and then shipping these containers to different warehouse they are delivered to their final destinations. In order to handle the proposed problem, thi...

We consider the freight consolidation and containerization problem, which consists of loading items into containers and then shipping these containers to different warehouses from where they are delivered to their final destinations. We show through computational experiments that very good solutions can be obtained by heuristically aggregating the items and then using MIP approaches to deal wit...

The concept of flow has become particularly important in logistics and freight distribution. From a simple question of capacity, the issues of timing, frequency and punctuality are now of significant relevance in freight movements since they are part of supply chain management strategies. In particular, transport terminals and freight distribution centers have been the major elements permitting...

A fair cost allocation scheme is critical for forming and sustaining horizontal cooperation that leads to cost reductions. In order to incentivize suppliers to cooperate in freight consolidation, we design a cost-sharing mechanism to solve a cost allocation problem arising in freight consolidation among small suppliers: that is, suppliers whose total demand fits into one truckload. This cost-sh...

In freight consolidation, a “fair” cost allocation scheme is critical for forming and sustaining horizontal cooperation that leads to reduced transportation cost. We study a cost-sharing problem in a freight consolidation system with one consolidation center and a common destination. In particular, we design a mechanism that collects bids from a set of suppliers, and then decides whose demand t...

Globalization induces the transport sector and supply chains to adapt to new functional and operational considerations. This is particularly the case for North America because of the geographical scale and scope of its production, distribution and consumption activities (Brooks, 2008; Rodrigue and Hesse, 2007). In a context where transport technology such as containerization has been a powerful...

In the last four decades the container as an essential part of a unitload-concept has achieved undoubted importance in international sea freight transportation. With ever increasing containerization the number of seaport container terminals and competition among them have become quite remarkable. Operations are nowadays unthinkable without effective and efficient use of information technology a...

the aim of this paper is to present an efficient method for a rail freight car fleet sizing problem. this problem is modeled mathematically as a multi-period, dynamic and multi-objective, in which the rail freight wagons are assumed to be heterogeneous. demands for different wagons and all travel times are assumed deterministic. in order to increase the utilization of the available wagons in th...