Publications

Summary:
This paper introduces a novel quay crane design, a double girder bridge crane (DGBC). DGBC is capable of handling containers of two adjacent bays simultaneously, avoiding crane collisions, saving traveling and repositioning costs, and eventually improving terminal efficiency. This problem is formulated as a resource-constrained project scheduling to minimize the maximum completion time.

Summary:
As available data have increased and as the national transportation funding bills have moved toward objective evaluation, departments of transportation (DOTs) throughout the United States have begun to develop tools to attempt to measure the effects of different projects. Increasingly, DOTs recognize that the freight transportation system is necessarily multimodal. However, no DOTs have clearly stated objective tools with which to evaluate multimodal freight project comparisons.

Summary:
The warehousing industry experienced a period of rapid growth from 1998 to 2009. This paper compares how the geographic distribution of warehouses changed in both the Los Angeles and Seattle Metropolitan Areas over that time period. These two west coast cities were chosen due to their geographic spread and proximity to major ports as well as their difference in size.

Summary:
This article identifies the truck routing priorities of freight companies through a survey of Washington state shippers, carriers, and receivers. To elicit these priorities, the survey prompted the respondents to rate 15 items believed to affect route choice decision making with respect to each item’s influence on route choice.

Summary:
Currently, knowledge of actual freight flows in the US is insufficient at a level of geographic resolution that permits corridor-level freight transportation analysis and planning. Commodity specific origins, destinations, and routes are typically estimated from four-step models or commodity flow models. At a sub-regional level, both of these families of models are built on important assumptions driven by the limited availability of data.

Summary:
While recent urban planning efforts have focused on smart growth development and management of growth into developed areas, the research community has not examined the impacts of these development patterns on urban goods movement. Successful implementation of growth strategies has multiple environmental and social benefits, but it also raises the demand for intraurban goods movement, potentially increasing conflicts between modes of travel and worsening air quality.

Summary:
Shippers and motor carriers are impacted by and react differently to travel time variability due to their positions within the supply chain and end goals. Through interviews and focus groups these differences have been further examined. Shippers, defined here as entities that send or receive goods, but do not provide the transportation themselves, are most often concerned with longer-term disruptions, which are typically considered within the context of transportation system resilience.

Summary:
North American rail terminals need productivity improvements to handle increasing rail volumes and improve terminal performance. This paper examines the benefits of double cycling in wide-span gantry terminals that use automated transfer management systems.

Summary:
This paper presents a model for planning an air charter service for pre-scheduled group travel. This model is used to investigate the competitiveness of such an enterprise for student athlete travel in conference sports. The relevant demand subset to be served by a limited charter fleet is identified through a comparison with existing scheduled travel options. Further, the routing and scheduling of the charter aircraft is performed within the same framework.

Summary:
Growing pressure to limit greenhouse gas emissions is changing the way businesses operate. This paper presents the trade-offs between cost, service quality (represented by time window guarantees), and emissions of an urban pickup and delivery system under these changing pressures. A model, developed by the authors in ArcGIS, is used to evaluate these trade-offs for a specific case study involving a real fleet with specific operational characteristics.

Summary:
This article will explore the reliability of the port drayage network. Port drayage is an important component of the marine intermodal system and affects the efficiency of the intermodal supply chain. Sharing and utilizing drayage truck arrival information could improve both port drayage and port operational efficiency. In this article two reliability measures are used to evaluate how the travel time reliability changes with trip origins and across drayage networks.

Summary:
Activities of commercial vehicles just before or just following international border crossings are not well understood. Logistical responses to border crossings are believed to increase miles traveled empty, total travel times, and total vehicle emissions.

Summary:
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.

Summary:
Between 1998 and 2005, employment in the U.S. warehousing industry grew at a compound annual growth rate of 22.23%, and the number of establishments increased at compound annual growth rate of 9.48%. Over this same period of time, the price for transportation fuels increased dramatically and became much more volatile. In this paper we examine the microeconomic and macroeconomic forces that have enabled such rapid growth in the warehousing industry.

Summary:
This life cycle assessment case study puts the supply chain contribution of transportation to greenhouse gas emissions in context with other contributors using American wheat grain as a representative product. Multiple locations, species and routes to market are investigated.