Freight transportation in regional logistics: pick-up, consolidation and delivery operations of a road carrier

The paper presents models and procedures for the design of extra-urban road transportation services operated by a carrier, who have to ship freight from a local production area to regional consumption markets. It is a many-to-many freight pick-up and delivery problem, where freight consolidation activities are present and they are out-of-vehicle. The transportation services considered in the paper are operated by a carrier, who travel along the Italian extra-urban road transportation network in order to deliver perishable freight from producers (located in the Province of Reggio Calabria, Italy) to final clients (located in the Northern of Italy). The paper presents the results of the application of two Vehicle Routing (VR) algorithms, greedy and genetic, for optimal design of above road transportation services.