Solution of Large-Scale Transportation Problems Through Aggregation

From a large-scale transportation problem (I) a smaller one (II) is derived by the aggregation of origins (destinations). A procedure is given to find an optimal solution X to problem I, starting from an optimal solution Y to problem II, and considering at each step only a small part of the orginal problem's data. While the proposed method is applicable to any transportation problem, its efficiency increases with (a) the size of the problem, and (b) the unevenness of the territorial distribution of origins (destinations).