A multi-commodity and vehicle routing based model for long haul shipment

In this work we focus our analysis in the transportation of pallets which have to be forwarded in a country-wide net-work with the aim to lower the used vehicles. The developed model has been tested against instances provided by an Italian logistics operator proving a substantial improvement in the forwarding process if addressed with the optimization model. While the real case instances can be solved in reasonable time with the exact approach, the complexity of the model give rise to approximation studies suitable for larger instances.