13. Data Aggregation in Network Design

In this chapter, we will focus our attention on one of the most interesting, yet challenging parts of network design—data aggregation (we’ll refer to it as just “aggregation”). Aggregation is putting the data of your supply chain into logical groups for the purposes of modeling. For example, instead of modeling every single item that moves through the supply chain, our model may contain only a small handful of product groups. When we aggregate, we typically aggregate the following:

• Products (from many different individual products to a small number of product families)

• Customers (from many different actual delivery locations to several hundred aggregate points representing all the customers in a geographic ...

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