Solution of Large-Scale Transportation Problems Through Aggregation

Abstract

From a large-scale transportation problem (I) a smaller one (II) is derived by the aggregation of origins (destinations). A procedure is given to find an optimal solution X to problem I, starting from an optimal solution Y to problem II, and considering at each step only a small part of the orginal problem's data. While the proposed method is applicable to any transportation problem, its efficiency increases with ( a ) the size of the problem, and ( b ) the unevenness of the territorial distribution of origins (destinations).