A multi-agent approach to load consolidation in transportation

The operational decisions of today's logistics sector have many difficulties such as dynamism of the order attributes and environmental changes. This sector is generally operating under unpredictable environments and having high degree of complex interactions. The dispatch officers especially have difficulties while making load/capacity/route planning and load consolidation decisions. They use numerous alternative consolidation techniques in order to be cost effective during their decisions such as time based consolidation or quantity based consolidation or both of them simultaneously. In this paper we propose a multi-agent based load consolidation decision making approach. In the proposed approach the load consolidation decisions for the less-than-truckload orders are made by the software agents. The less-than-truckload orders are assigned/consolidated to the trucks by the negotiation mechanism constructed within the model. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.