This paper describes how flexibility and reactivity are capabilities required to act in the global market. To improve such characteristics production systems have to enhance the efficiency of their external product logistics, i.e., their delivery policies. Then, to tackle with this problem, in this paper the challenge of improving the performances of freight deliveryin Distributed Supply Chains is faced by means of a heuristic two-level optimization algorithm. At the first local level, each node solve its owndelivery problem, whereas at the second global level a heuristic approach is defined with the aim of guiding the nodes towards the global network optimum. In addition to the solution algorithm, the distributed computing architecture is also described.
Samenvatting