System and method for optimizing linehaul operations

G - Physics – 06 – Q

Patent

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G06Q 10/04 (2012.01)

Patent

CA 2551467

The efficiency of transportation operations is one of the factors having a significant effect on the country's economic growth. A case study for Day and Ross Inc. (D & R) was used to develop and implement this precent invention to improve the efficiency of general linehaul trucking operations. D & R is one of the biggest Canadian trucking companies, which provides service in the US as well as to 0.1 spatially scattered terminals across Canada through its linehaul operations. A linehaul operation, one of the biggest contributors to the total operating cost of a trucking company, involves moving full trailer loads of less than truck, load or full truck load shipments using owner- operator and/or company tractors. The lack of software specifically designed for linehaul planning and scheduling motivated the development of an Integrated Optimization System that could primarily assist planners in making their daily operational decisions and also help in reducing the total operating cost or any linehaul trucking company. The System can also assist the Management in making tactical and strategic decisions. The four major quantifiable factors contributing to the total operating cost in linehaul operations are the full miles, empty miles, brokered miles, and wait-time cost. The Optimization Model was developed to minimize the total operating cost by taking all essential decision variables into account, by increasing the full miles while minimizing the empty miles, broker miles, and wait-time cost. The Model is a unique hybrid model, which uses a modified exact solution assignment algorithm incorporating several heuristics that were specifically developed to maximize efficiency gains, all within an acceptable computation time. The efficiency improvements were obtained while meeting a number of operational and regulatory constraints and customer requirements. The final results show that using the Optimization system developed in this preset invention can achieve an approximate 4.8% reduction in the total operating cost. This translates into approximately $6.5million in savings for D & R for the year 2005, if the system had been used instead of existing manual planning methods. Some of the non--quantifiable benefits resulting from the use of the Optimization system are higher customer, planner, and owner-operator satisfaction.

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