Economic growth leads to a greater demand for goods which in turn leads to an increase in demand of freight. Urban freight traffic is rising exponentially to meet the growing needs of an increasingly urban population. However, due to the inefficiency in transportation, the impact of this growth in urban freight has harmful consequences.

While large-scale industries, distribution centres and third-party logistics operators have well-defined supply chain logistics plans to tackle traffic congestion, smaller establishments, such as the independent wholesale and retail outlets cannot manage as efficiently. They generate substantial freight traffic and their disaggregate operations are comparatively less amenable to city-wide plans to reduce traffic congestion.

Freight consolidation is the process of combining multiple packages or partial loads together into one truck. It has monetary and environmental benefits for both customers (industries/establishments) and truckers. If implemented, freight consolidation can avoid/minimise less than load (LTL) freight vehicles in urban areas which , in turn, reduces the road traffic and emission of greenhouse gases.

The objective of the study is to identify a suitable freight consolidation strategy and assess its feasibility for a freight trip generation hub in Chennai as a case study.