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.