Freight distribution performance indicators for service
quality planning in large transportation networks
Francesco Paolo Deflorio
•
Guido Perboli
•
Roberto Tadei
Published online: 11 January 2011
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract
This paper studies the use of performance indicators in routing problems
to estimate how transportation cost is affected by the quality of service offered. The
quality of service is assumed to be directly dependent on the size of the time
windows. Smaller time windows mean better service. Three performance indicators
are introduced. These indicators are calculated directly from the data without the
need of a solution method. The introduced indicators are based mainly on a ‘‘request
compatibility’’, which describes whether two visits can be scheduled consecutively
in a route. Other two indicators are introduced, which get their values from a greedy
constructive heuristic. After introducing the indicators, the correlation between
indicators and transportation cost is examined. It is concluded that the indicators
give a good first estimation on the transportation cost incurred when providing a
certain quality of service. These indicators can be calculated easily in one of the first
planning steps without the need of a sophisticated solution tool. The contribution of
the paper is the introduction of a simple set of performance indicators that can be
used to estimate the transportation cost of a routing problem with time windows
.