ABSTRACT
Logistics is concerned with the organization, movement, and storage of material and people. Also referred as physical distribution, materials handling, transportation management, and business logistics, it is a vital area of business management responsible for planning, implementing, and controlling the various activities associated to the flow of goods, services, and related information that arise between production centers and marketplaces. Consider the situation in which customers from different locations demand different products in different quantities. From the company’s point of view, this triggers a chain of decisions that have to be coordinated in order to ensure that the right products will be delivered to the right places in the desired conditions and at the right time (Ballou, 2004; Ghiani et al., 2004).
