Performances of Heuristic Algorithms for Consolidated Transportation with Weight and Volume Constraints

Since the transportation cost takes about two thirds of the logistics cost of Korean firms, significant reduction of business logistics cost can hardly be achieved without effectively reducing the transportation cost. Although consolidated transportation has been regarded as the most promising strategy for reducing the transportation cost, it has not been successful in practice. In this paper we consider a consolidated transportation for the factories located in a limited area such as industrial complexes, where loads of various volume and weight are consolidated. We want to group the loads to assign to a truck of various size such that the total transportation cost is minimized, while the maximum volume constraint and weight constraint of each truck are satisfied. We suggest four heuristic algorithms to efficiently determine the groups of loads; and conduct a computer simulation to evaluate the performances of the algorithms.