Design, management and evaluation of inter-cities transportation logistics

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Challenges facing freight transportation within urban areas are different from those facing inter-city transportation. Environment conservation, roads congestion, security and just in time deliveries are essential issues for intra-city transportation. For inter-city transportation, economical and resource availability issues are dominating in the planning process. Another important difference is that LTL (less than truck loads) dominate in intra-city transportation while single-destination operations are more common in inter-city operations. In response to intra-city transportation issues, a new area of transportation planning, called city logistics, emerged. In countries of high population density, like Japan, intra-city transportation may represent up to 67% of transportation activities while in countries like Canada, inter-city transportation is more important in terms of cost and mileage. The goals of this research project are: (1) to underline important issues facing inter-city freight transportation logistics in comparison to city logistics, (2) to review the literature on inter-city freight transportation planning, and (3) to develop concepts, knowledge and techniques appropriate for designing, planning and operating inter-city transportation logistics. This research area will be called inter-city logistics. The main initiatives to analyse in this research project are: (1) shared and public logistics terminal networks, (2) collaborative freight transportation policies, and (3) common information systems and information sharing within a freight transportation alliance. The aim is to develop methods to design networks of public or shared logistic terminals, to determine how to share costs and revenues of such terminals and how to schedule terminal and inter-terminal operations.