Browsing by Author "McZeal, Cassandra"

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    Strategic Load Planning for Less-Than-Truckload Trucking
    (1999-06) Hoppe, Bruce; Klampfl, Erica Zimmer; McZeal, Cassandra; Rich, Jennifer
    Less-than-truckload trucking represents a portion of the motor carrier industry in which the shipments to be sent on trucks do not completely fill a 45,000 lb. volume tractor-trailer. Typically, the freight in each shipment weighs under 10,000 lbs., with a large majority falling under 1000 lbs. Since each shipment does not fill a truck, significant savings can be achieved by consolidating shipments into loads at regional terminals and transporting these loads from terminal to terminal. The goal of the strategic load planning problem is to determine how to route the flow of consolidated loads from origin terminals to destination terminals cost effectively and allowing for certain service standards. The actual gathering of these shipments at the origin terminal and the distribution of them from the destination terminal is handled in a separate problem commonly referred to as the pick-up and delivery problem. This overall method of distribution requires a network of terminals, the design of which is closely related to many classic network design problems. We have built a software system which, when given the appropriate data concerning a company's needs and past routing decisions, will build a network to solve the strategic load planning problem. The empirical results, based on real data from trucking companies, indicate that our system does a very credible job of building an efficient network.