Network design and planning with resource pooling: The context of merging two logistics entities

Logistics pooling is relatively a new concept in transportation and logistics optimization, but is very important in practice. It has been identified in literature with different facets reflecting its evolution. Collaborative transportation and consolidations in storage, transfer centers, paths, vehicles loading in one side, and in supply plans in the other side, seem to constitute together a promising alternative to model and to optimize. This research focuses on the case of merging several separate logistics entities and processes, and highlights pooling effects as a result. It is inspired from a real case of logistics service providers in western of France in the field of food distribution according to a Location-Allocation Problem (LAP) with a single-echelon network. The design of logistics network is recalculated by searching possible synergies in order to reconfigure delivery profiles (cadences and amounts) and consolidate flows of the independent operators into a shared organization. Several Mixed Integer Programs are provided to model new optimized Logistics Master Plans (LMP) that lead tactical aspects to the strategic ones. Experimental pooling effect has been shown in the middle of the models performance measure.