. Less-than-truckload freight transportation
National less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers’ freight networks are configured in a
hub-and-spoke configuration. The end-of-line (spoke) terminals conduct inbound and outbound operations. Inbound operations involve the collection of freight from local
customers and outbound operations involve the delivery of freight to local customers.
The freight collected from the local customers is consolidated and shipped to the closest hub. LTL carriers deal with shipments that are less than a full truckload, where
a tractor-trailer can carry an average of 20-30 shipments that may have different
origins and destinations. The hubs, in addition to inbound and outbound operations, perform breakbulk operations which consolidate freight from end-of-line terminals and
transfer the freight to other hubs. The flow of freight in and out of a terminal varies
throughout the day. Freight from end-of line terminals usually arrive at the end of the day and freight to local customers are shipped in the beginning of the day. Freight
from other hubs may arrive anytime during the day.
LTL terminals, as shown in Figure 1, resemble a warehouse with docks along its perimeter with 10-200 or more doors. The two types of doors in the terminals are strip
LTL terminal operations
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Admin. Space
Figure 1.
A typical LTL terminal
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doors for receiving and load doors for shipping to specific destinations. When a trailer arrives at a terminal, it is either assigned to a strip door or it is sent to a queue of trailers waiting to be unloaded. Once the trailer is parked at an open door, the shipments are unloaded and delivered to load doors according to their destinations. The unloaded trailer is pulled out of the strip door and replaced by another incoming trailer. At the load doors, once a trailer is loaded, it is closed and replaced with another empty trailer that will be loaded with shipments to the same destination.
The existing approaches to modeling and analyzing terminal operations in LTL industry focus on developing mathematical optimization models where the assignment of origins and destinations to docks are made with the objective of minimizing the distance traveled by the packages within the warehouse. This approach minimizes the cost of operating these terminals by reducing the workforce required to transfer the goods from strip to load doors (Peck, 1983; Tsui and Chang, 1990, 1992). Mathematical modeling approaches utilize a static flow level to determine the optimal door assignments. These approaches are prescriptive in nature and are valuable for understanding the problem. However, they fall short of describing operational performance measures related to maintaining the desired service levels such as utilization of resources within the terminal and parameters related to pallet queues at strip and load doors. Furthermore, for some performance measures such as queue lengths, maximum values are as important as average values and fluctuations in these measures during the operation of the terminal are important from an operational perspective. Other significant contributions to the study of LTL terminal operations can be found in Gue (1999, 2004) and Bartholdi and Gue (2000).
In this paper, we describe a discrete event simulation approach to the modeling and analysis of LTL terminal operations using ARENA by Rockwell Automation (2004).
Based on the flow data between origins and destinations, the simulation model is used to simulate alternative dock assignment scenarios to quantify the possible performance improvements. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 3
includes the description of the simulation model, and its inputs and outputs. Section 4 describes the comparison of the performance measures of the existing assignment of doors at a national LTL terminal with an alternative assignment based on a dock
assignment heuristic. Section 5 includes conclusions and future research directions.