This paper quantifies the benefits to drayage trucks and container terminals from a data-sharing strategy designed to improve operations at the drayage truck-container terminal interface. This paper proposes a simple rule for using truck information to reduce container rehandling work and suggests a method for evaluating yard crane productivity and truck transaction time. Various scenarios with different levels of information quality are considered to explore how information quality affects system efficiency (i.e., truck wait time and yard crane productivity). Different block configurations and truck arrival rates are also investigated to evaluate the effectiveness of truck information under various system configurations. The research demonstrates that a small amount of truck information can significantly improve crane productivity and reduce truck delay, especially for those terminals operating near capacity or using intensive container stacking, and that complete truck arrival sequence information is not necessary for system improvement.

A number of trucking companies use Global Positioning System (GPS) devices for fleet management. Data extracted from these devices can provide valuable traffic information such as spot (instantaneous) speeds and vehicle trajectory. However, the accuracy of GPS spot speeds has not been fully explored, and there is concern about their use for estimating truck travel speed. This concern was addressed by initially comparing GPS spot speeds with speeds estimated from dual-loop detectors. A simple speed estimation method based on GPS spot speeds was devised to estimate link travel speed, and that method was compared with space mean speed estimation based on GPS vehicle location and time data. The analysis demonstrated that aggregated GPS spot speeds generally matched loop detector speeds and captured travel conditions over time and space. Speed estimation based on GPS spot speeds was sufficiently accurate in comparison with space mean speeds, with a mean absolute difference of less than 6%. It is concluded that GPS spot speed data provide an alternative for measuring freight corridor performance and truck travel characteristics.