Bin Packing Methodologies for Capacity Planning in Freight Transportation and Logistics

Capacity planning may be defined as the process of determining the appropriate mix and quantity of resources to meet demand. We focus on Consolidation-based Freight Transportation and Logistics in this chapter, particularly on the planning of the supply capacity required to satisfy known or predicted, customer or internally-generated demand. It is noticeable that standard capacity formulations are based on a rough approximation of the physical and operational attributes of storage and movement capacity units and of how demand flows use that capacity. Bin Packing appears as a more appropriate methodology to address this issue and yet, few contributions in the literature focus on this topic is. Our objective is to start filling this gap in knowledge. The chapter recalls the main packing problems and models, identifies the main categories of stakeholders with their principal capacity requirements, reviews the relevant literature and proposes research avenues