Periodic shipping strategies for the minimization of the logistic costs

In this paper we study the often neglected relationship between inventory and transportation costs in several logistic networks. In particular, we first consider the problem of shipping several products in the single link case. In this problem a set of products has to be shipped from a common origin to a common destination; the aim is to determine a periodic shipping strategy which minimizes the sum of the transportation and inventory costs. We present a general framework of analysis from which we derive the known approaches with a continuous frequency and with given frequencies as particular cases. Moreover, we consider two more complex logistic networks, the one origin-multiple destinations case and the sequences of links case, and we show a property of the inventory.