Rationalization of goods movement based on an analysis of dynamic scheduling of freight collection vehicles in urban centre.

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When deliveries are concerned, in general, goods are delivered based on a schedule made by carriers. However, the pick-up activities have different character due to two important issues. (1) The predetermined times have a large effect on the schedule and (2) the schedule usually has to be changed as additional requests made through the telephone to the truck operator. The detour action performed by the operator has the potential to disrupt the promised schedule to customers receiving daily service at predetermined times or force operators to work long hours and travel excessive distances. In order to understand the characteristics of collective truck movement, this study has adopted a hybrid technique to obtain data on delivery and pick-up truck movement, including a survey in which physical movement of a truck is recorded by an on-board observer who rides next to the operator and a stated preference survey, which is prepared based on the observation survey. This study has described characteristics of collective truck activity in Japanese city and has developed two models related to truck movement, which are useful to improve collective truck movement. The first model reproduces the schedule of collective trucks, which is made at the depot. The actual routing of the collective truck has some aspects of optimization in it, because in practice, truck operators make efforts to transport goods efficiently. However, routing of pick-up activities that have to treat additional pick-up requests usually by phone is too complicated to experientially optimize by an individual operator. The second model to incorporate the dynamic routing capabilities to pick up loads from the service region can be used to investigate the effectiveness of some operating strategies related to the detour responses made by trucks to pick up loads.