73Production/Distribution/Routing Planning for Supply Chain Networks
integrated manner. In the rst phase, they assumed that the distribution of
the products from plants to customers is carried out by direct shipment. The
problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming problem, neglecting
the vehicle routing constraints, and solved by the CPLEX MIP solver. In the
second phase, they propose a heuristic transporter routing algorithm, called
the load consolidation (LC) algorithm, to consolidate the loads into routing
decisions. The LC algorithm determines the sequence of transporter trips
and allocates the transporters to the trips without violating the transporter
capacity and available time constraints. The extended optimal partitioni