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Empty container trucks may cause a deficit in transport capacity and contribute to congestion and emissions in the port territory. Reengineering of the container truck hauling process to introduce truck-sharing arrangements using the truck appointment system has the potential of reducing the number of empty-truck trips. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This research evaluates the results from an investigation of the truck appointment system using a case study approach. The data collection phase involved primary and secondary sources along with using publicly available data on port operations.

The study explores a dynamic truck-sharing facility for a computer-based matching system to assign probable export containers to available empty slots of a container truck. The proposed model reengineers the truck appointment system with a potential to reduce the number of empty-truck trips to increase container transport capacity around seaport gates.

Due to continuous increases in container-freight traffic, leading seaports of the world are experiencing a capacity shortage resulting in traffic congestion. The research findings are useful in practice as the proposed truck-sharing model can be introduced to enhance capacity in the container transport chain of the port territory.

The empty-trucks problem has not been addressed much in studies from a decentralized perspective where all truck operators have an equal chance to contribute to optimize the supply chain in contrast with the typical one-company-based optimization. The solution addressed here uses the shared-transportation concept to cover the research gap.

The purpose of this paper is to explore, through a synthesis of the literature, the causes, benefits, constraints and ways for reducing the number of empty trips made by container trucks. Reduced empty truck trips contribute to sustainable transportation practices in the port territory.

To contribute in the current body of the literature, through a comprehensive synthesis of the studies, this study examines many perspectives surrounding the empty truck trips at container terminals. Hence different, but relevant operational aspects of empty truck trips are explored. This study adopts a content analysis as the research methodology.

Different perspectives, which are drawn from the reviewed literature, identify a research gap in published research in the area of transport collaboration (of supply chain collaboration) and coordination problems in hinterland transport chains (of maritime logistics), and the literature relating to backhauling (of vehicle routing problems with backhauls). To cover that research gap in the literature, this study attempts to highlight and synthesize the important empty-trips studies currently available into a coherent and understandable form.

As an integral part of encouraging collaboration in the container transportation industry, this research may be effective in persuading port authorities to evaluate and to help transport managers to reply to specific enquiries of truck-sharing arrangements.

The utilization of available empty space of container trucks is a feasible option of increasing transport capacity and achieving sustainable transportation benefits.

This paper provides a contemporary lens to view the relationship between empty trips and their applications in the carrier industry, in order to resolve the perceived issues of non-sustainable transportation and their implications for the society.

This study aims to explore the challenges of truck-sharing and effective ways of dealing with those in achieving supply chain collaboration and collaboration in transportation management (e.g. transport collaboration) for transport capacity expansion, and reducing carbon emission and traffic congestion for integrating environmental and social sustainability issues. This paper also reveals insights into successful shared-transportation and a reduction in empty trips.

This exploratory qualitative study was conducted by means of interviewing road carriers from the container transportation industry.

In a truck-sharing initiative, technical issues (e.g. carrying capacity) arise, some of which involve the container truck and some involving constraints that cannot be controlled, such as driving restrictions, seaport operating hours, and the presence of the large number of container categories pertaining to the industry. Therefore, a significant amount of “structural empty running” may always prevail. It should also be noted that some, seemingly vital, constraints can actually be changed, treated, or modified for better truck-sharing outcomes, such as building a foundation of trust and establishing coordination among road carriers.

A probable solution to the problem of increasing hinterland transport capacity is to make appropriate use of the huge number of idle truck slots that exist; this could be achieved by encouraging the acceptance of the challenges of truck-sharing realistically and suggesting an approach to handling them.

To broaden its appeal, truck-sharing initiatives must be able to overcome challenges by combining theoretical insight with an understanding of the practical aspects of such an endeavor. This original research fosters knowledge that is unique and which also has real-life applications in maritime logistics studies and supply chain literature for both port authorities and container road carriers.

The issue of empty truck trips is largely ignored in the current literature. In order to cover this important research gap, the purpose of this paper is to explore, describe, categorize and rank the potential truck-sharing constraints for container trucks traveling empty around the port gates.

In order to contribute empirically to the current body of knowledge and understandings of truck-sharing constraints, this paper adopts a multi-method empirical approach involving both qualitative interviews and quantitative questionnaire surveys.

Among many key constraints that influence the future of truck-sharing opportunities, the authors determine, for example, that a carrier’s ability to earn the trust of its competitors is one of the top most important factors of success for a fruitful truck-sharing event. The problem is, perhaps, further complicated because of the increasing competitive environment in the container transport industry, as well as the lack of effective coordination between the key parties involved.

None of the earlier studies has provided a broad understanding and ranking of the truck-sharing constraints that should be considered in truck-sharing events, although the empty trips issue has been limitedly mentioned in the recent academic literature.

Empty truck trips are wasted miles. Wasted empty miles decrease transport capacity in the container distribution chain along with causing an increase in carbon emission, traffic congestion, fuel consumption and environmental pollution. The research results can be used by policy makers to underpin effective measures to prevent the low utilization of trucks.

This study addresses an important gap. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study in the area that ranks truck-sharing constraints to reduce empty trucks trips.

The purpose of this study is to develop a holistic optimization model for an integrated sustainable fleet planning and closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) network design problem under uncertainty.

A novel mixed-integer programming model that is able to consider interactions between vehicle fleet planning and CLSC network design problems is first developed. Uncertainties of the product demand and return fractions of the end-of-life products are handled by a chance-constrained stochastic program. Several Pareto optimal solutions are generated for the conflicting sustainability objectives via compromise and fuzzy goal programming (FGP) approaches.

The proposed model is tested on a real-life lead/acid battery recovery system. By using the proposed model, sustainable fleet plans that provide a smaller fleet size, fewer empty vehicle repositions, minimal CO₂ emissions, maximal vehicle safety ratings and minimal injury/illness incidence rate of transport accidents are generated. Furthermore, an environmentally and socially conscious CLSC network with maximal job creation in the less developed regions, minimal lost days resulting from the work's damages during manufacturing/recycling operations and maximal collection/recovery of end-of-life products is also designed.

Unlike the classical network design models, vehicle fleet planning decisions such as fleet sizing/composition, fleet assignment, vehicle inventory control, empty repositioning, etc. are also considered while designing a sustainable CLSC network. In addition to sustainability indicators in the network design, sustainability factors in fleet management are also handled. To the best of the authors' knowledge, there is no similar paper in the literature that proposes such a holistic optimization model for integrated sustainable fleet planning and CLSC network design.

A seaport is an essential part of a supply chain, but many ports experience truck shortages, creating pressure for port authorities from shippers who need more trucks that move cargo. This study explores and ranks the motives for adopting a truck-sharing concept (where shippers share the same truck for delivery) as a mechanism to improve transport capacity.

This study adopts a multi-method approach – both interviews and surveys. Interviews are first conducted with shippers to explore truck-sharing usage motives. Next, quantitative surveys of both shippers and carriers are conducted to rank those motives.

The study identifies five motives (operational efficiency goal, quick transport solution, sustainability policy, convenience-seeking behavior and secure transport process) for truck-sharing, four critical transport attributes (lower charges for freight, distance travelled, full capacity utilization and environmental recognition), four psychological consequences (monetary savings, greater safety, instant availability of trips and clarification of environmental values), and six core values (secure transport process, being careful of money, ease of doing business, sustainability, status in the community and recognition by customers of shippers).

The qualitative results will help researchers better understand how usage motives influence shippers' willingness to share a truck for transport needs. The quantitative results are useful for ranking truck-sharing motives by their importance.

Based on the findings, managers of carriers can categorize shippers according to their specific needs and thereby customize promotions to attract more shippers.

The findings provide the first, exploratory insights into shippers' motives.

The aim is to examine the recent trend in empty running by trucks in the UK and assesses the potential for a further reduction in empty running in the food supply chain using a new technique.

Data from the UK Government's main road freight survey and other studies are used to investigate the causes of the decline in empty running. Previous attempts to quantify opportunities for backloading are reviewed. The 2002 KPI Survey in the UK food supply chain created a large multi‐fleet database of over 20,000 trips, which permitted retrospective analysis of backloading opportunities. A method was devised to screen these opportunities against four selection criteria and assess the overall potential for cutting empty truck‐kms.

Suitable backloads were found for only 2.4 per cent of the empty journey legs, representing 2 per cent of empty truck‐kms. The analysis highlights the operational constraints on backloading in a sector characterised by short average trip length, tight scheduling and variable use of refrigeration.

The analysis provides a more accurate and realistic assessment of backloading potential than previous studies, though is still deficient in several respects. The main shortcomings relate to the sampling method and structure of the Transport KPI Survey. The analytical framework requires further development to refine backload search areas, incorporate commercial data and permit sensitivity analysis.

The paper shows how retrospective analysis of road deliveries made over a short period (48 hour) can identify opportunities for backloading at a sectoral level. It combines government statistics and original survey data to provide both a macro‐ and micro‐level perspective on the empty running problem.

This paper studied a bid generation problem in combinatorial transportation auctions that considered in-vehicle consolidations. The purpose of this paper seeks to establish mixed integer programming to the most profitable transportation task packages.

The authors proposes a mathematical model to identify the most profitable transportation task packages under vehicle capacity, flow balance and in-vehicle consolidation operational constraints, after which a two-phase heuristic algorithm was designed to solve the proposed model. In the first phase, a method was defined to compute bundle synergy, which was then combined with particle swarm optimization (PSO) to determine a satisfactory task package, and in the second phase, the PSO was adopted to program vehicle routings that considered in-vehicle consolidation.

Three numerical examples were given to analyze the effects of the proposed model and method, with the first two small-scale examples coming from the same data base and the third being a larger scale example. The results showed that: (1) the proposed model was able to find a satisfactory solution for the three numerical examples; (2) the computation time was significantly shorter than the accurate algorithm and (3) considering in-vehicle consolidations operations could increase the carrier profits.

The highlights of this paper are summarized as following: (1) it considers in-vehicle consolidation when generating bids to maximize profits; (2) it simultaneously identifies the most valuable lane packages and reconstructs vehicle routes and (3) proposes a simple but effective synergy-based method to solve the model.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the extant literature about the co-evolvement of Business Process Management (BPM) and the Internet of Things (IoT) by proposing the IoT-enabled Context-aware BPM (IoT-CaBPM) framework to bridge from the IoT infrastructure to context-aware business processes.

Motivated by the “Three Waves” of BPM research, IoT-enabled context-awareness is, therefore, expected to be achieved for enhancing the business process design, which pilots a new wave of BPR (Business Process Redesign/Reengineering) to enable the business process coevolve with IoT and analytics. This paper reports an illustrative case study of BPR in a Chinese bulk port, one of the hub seaports that widely adopted IoT technologies over the last few years.

The IoT implementation and data analytics has increased the efficiency and improve the monitoring effectively. The proposed IoT-CaBPM framework availably helps to identify and match nodes of IoT devices, business decisions and analytic models in order to redesign a business process towards context-aware variability. As IoT is rapidly becoming the new dominant IT paradigm is moving towards mature implementation in various industries, the corresponding BPR must be planned and executed strategically for achieving better benefits.

Despite some research extend BPM standard by integrating IoT devices as a sort of resources or report generically that the ports operations are affected by IoT, there is still a lack of layers from the IoT infrastructure to context-aware business processes. An industrial BPR case with business models in detail is also a lack for presenting the specific implications and effectiveness of the adoption of such technologies. This paper fills in this gap.

The most costly part in an open-pit mine is the transportation of material out of the mine. The efficiency of the truck-and-shovel fleet plays a major role in cost control. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The truck dispatching simulation model with consideration of age-based maintenance is proposed.

This paper underlines an impact of truck dispatching decisions and reveals remarkable differences in the total production under different approaches of operational availability. Additionally, the simulated results introduce an effective scheduled maintenance for different truck age levels.

The approach is based on a case study taking into account the stochastic equipment behavior and environment in a real open-pit mine. This approach can be used more generally in situations in which truck fleets are used to transport material.