Cargo Consolidation, Routing, and Location Optimization to Reduce Traffic Congestion 20240523 120628

Thursday, May 23, 2024 | 12:00 - 1:00 PM (ET)
Commercial heavy vehicles, with their reduced acceleration and deceleration capabilities compared to passenger cars, impact the traffic stream by increasing congestion. Therefore, reducing commercial vehicle trips will improve mobility.
Cargo consolidation or mixed-cargo shipments is an operational strategy that combines multiple Less Than Truckload (LTL) shipments of different products, typically from different companies, that are traveling in the same vicinity into one full truckload shipment. Cargo consolidation has gained traction in many industries because it reduces transportation costs while increasing asset utilization such as maximizing commercial heavy vehicle capacity. This practice achieves cost reductions and increased asset efficiency by reducing the number of trips that are needed to deliver the same volume of products among different companies. However, its implementation is far from optimal as it is often carried out by intuition and rudimentary operations leaving substantial opportunity for process improvements.
This work developed a methodology to optimize the consolidation of cargo and the routing of shipments of commercial heavy vehicles along with the location of logistics distribution centers to minimize distance, and the number of commercial heavy vehicle trips, while increasing the utilization of these transportation assets. The methodology includes public, and private sector insights stemmed from a survey and interviews, fusion and merging of different data sets pertaining to real-world private sector operations, and mathematical models and heuristics.
Results show positive impacts on traffic congestion by reducing total vehicle-miles(kilometers) traveled, and the number of commercial heavy vehicle trips, which translates in less heavy vehicles on the road.