Company’s Challenge

The main challenge is to optimize transportation plans while consolidating the flows of temperature-controlled goods, in order to minimize the overall transportation cost. This requires to handle simultaneously:

• Multi-echelon with cross-docking: Goods are either collected directly from the client’s factory or routed through the logistics provider’s central platform, before being transported to regional hubs for last-mile delivery to the client’s retail locations.
• Transport flow consolidation: A transportation plan is designed to leverage synergies by organizing shuttles between suppliers and the redistribution platform. At the other end of the chain, the solver determines whether the most efficient option is to deliver to a regional hub or directly to the client.
• Fleet management: The solver decides which operations should be handled by the internal fleet versus outsourced to third-party transport providers (typically used for serving more remote agencies).
• Route assignment and planning: The tool prescribes the optimal weekly distribution of operations, accounting for delivery time windows, cross-docking synchronization, multi-trips, and even double-shifts (with trucks returning to the depot for a driver change).

Solution provided

The optimization tool successfully minimized overall transportation costs while consolidating multiple flows.

It was also able to scale to large datasets and optimize the entire transportation plan end-to-end.