Delaware Valley Truck Parking Study

The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission's (DVRPC's) Regional Truck Parking Study was undertaken due to the important economic, environmental, and safety implications of a sufficient regional truck parking network. Truck drivers must work within the bounds of the federally mandated hours-of-service (HOS) rules and regulations. The combination of limited hours of driving, complex supply chains, and narrow delivery windows leads to a need for safe and secure overnight parking.Truck parking is usually provided by three different types of facilities: privately owned truck stops, service plazas, and welcome centers. This report contains details about each type of facility in the Delaware Valley region, including the amenities offered to drivers, the number of spaces, and proximity to other facilities. At present, the region possesses a total of 1,122 spaces, 879 of which are located at privately owned truck stops.The report estimates parking demand using two different methods. Overnight site visits were done to determine the utilization of authorized facilities and the location and utilization of unauthorized parking locations. The region's authorized facilities were found to be operating over capacity by 134 trucks during the site visits, with the Valley Forge and Woodrow Wilson Service Plazas accounting for 91 of those surplus trucks. Additional unauthorized parking was found on highway shoulders, around toll plazas, and in local industrial areas. Truck parking demand was also determined by adopting the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Truck Parking Demand Model to the region. The model determined that the region had a shortfall of 247 spaces in 2009.Finally, the report offers a set of multi-regional and regional actions intended to improve the regional truck parking network:Action 1: Fully utilize available public funding that directly supports the creation of additional overnight truck parking spacesAction 2: Advance the use of the latest Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies to optimize existing parking locationsAction 3: Reduce emissions that are caused by idling parked trucks Throughout the report, blue call-out boxes will be presented; they contain related information and interesting anecdotes pertinent to the topic under discussion.Action 4: Promote the need for additional truck parking spaces and amenities to both DVRPC partners and the publicAction 5: Improve access to existing truck parking facilitiesAction 6: Maintain existing facilities and create additional regional capacity where possibleAs with all work from DVRPC's Office of Freight Planning, this report was made possible by the continued support of the Delaware Valley Goods Movement Task Force

Analytical Modeling Framework to Assess the Economic and Environmental Impacts of Residential Deliveries, and Evaluate Sustainable Last-Mile Strategies

In the last decade, e‐commerce has grown substantially, increasing business‐to‐business, business‐to‐consumer, and consumer‐to‐consumer transactions. While this has brought prosperity for the e-retailers, the ever-increasing consumer demand has brought more trucks to the residential areas, bringing along externalities such as congestion, air and noise pollution, and energy consumption. To cope with this, different logistics strategies such as the introduction of micro-hubs, alternative delivery points, and use of cargo bikes and zero emission vehicles for the last mile have been introduced and, in some cases, implemented as well. This project, hence, aims to develop an analytical framework to model urban last mile delivery. In particular, this study will build upon the previously developed econometric behavior models that capture e-commerce demand. Then, based on continuous approximation techniques, the authors will model the last-mile delivery operations. And finally, using the cost-based sustainability assessment model (developed in this study), the authors will estimate the economic and environmental impacts of residential deliveries under different city logistics strategies.View the NCST Project Webpag

The Emergence of Successful Export Activities in Mexico: Three Case Studies

This paper consists of three case studies of the emergence of three successful export activities in Mexico: avocado production, the manufacture of catheters, and call center outsourcing. Each case study discusses how companies, associations, and governments at various levels have addressed market failures and facilitated the provision of public goods necessary for each activity. The case studies additionally profile first movers in each activity and describe the positive externalities they provide to imitators, particularly diffusion of export knowledge. Also include in each case study is a counterfactual case of a less successful activity (mangos, stem cell banking, and other types of business process outsourcing, respectively) and a section on policy implications.Agriculture, Exports, Manufacturing, Services, Mexico

Humanitarian Logistics: Shipping Designs for the Post Disaster Cargo Surge

In 2017 Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. The humanitarian aid community scrambled a response to support the 3.4 million people affected by the disaster. In response, thousands of shipping containers filled with supplies were sent to the island. Numerous reports surfaced regarding significant delays in receiving the shipments. This research reviews the historical account of cargo throughput into Puerto Rico following Maria. A computer simulation built in ARENA compares various what-if scenarios based on empirically collected data and interviews with FEMA, port authorities, and commercial cargo carriers to determine how the humanitarian supply chain could improve for future disaster planning. An additional goal of this research is to better inform humanitarian logisticians who must balance near-term disaster response demands with long term recovery concerns

A Simulation Study of Workforce Management for a Two-Stage Multi-Skill Customer Service Center

This paper considers the parameter optimization of a two-stage multi-skill customer service center, which provides e-commerce services to customers and bears the major operating cost in hiring service agents. Based on the customer flow in the two-stage mixed queueing system, a simulation model is developed to determine the system performance of interest. We present a sensitivity analysis to achieve better savings in the staffing cost and waiting time at a guaranteed service level. A series of simulation experiments are conducted via an Arena simulation platform to figure out the optimal system configurations. The contribution of our works is to provide a decision-making tool for workforce managers to evaluate the performance of the studied customer service centers

Freight-Truck-Pavement Interaction,Logistics, and Economics:Final Phase 1 Report (Tasks 9–11)

The intention of the study is to demonstrate the potential economic effects of delayed road maintenance and management, leading to deteriorated riding quality and subsequent increased vehicle operating costs, vehicle damage, and freight damage. The overall objectives of this project are to enable Caltrans to better manage the risks of decisions regarding freight and the management and preservation of the pavement network, as the potential effects of such decisions (i.e., to resurface and improve riding quality earlier or delay such a decision for a specific pavement) will be quantifiable in economic terms. This objective will be reached through applying the principles of vehicle-pavement interaction (V-PI) and state-of-the-practice tools to simulate and measure peak loads and vertical acceleration of trucks and their freight on a selected range of typical pavement surface profiles on the State Highway System (SHS) for a specific region or Caltrans district. The objectives of this report are to provide information on Tasks 9 to 11. Conclusions The following conclusions are drawn based on the information provided and discussed in this report: Road roughness data can be used in conjunction with appropriate models and relationships to evaluate the economic effect of road use by logistics companies through evaluation of vehicle operating costs (VOCs) and potential damage to vehicles and freight. As road roughness generally deteriorates with road use, road owners can evaluate the economic changes in the VOCs of road users over time, and determine optimum times for maintenance and rehabilitation of existing transportation infrastructure. Road users can use relationships between road roughness and various parameters (VOCs, freight damage, etc.) to select optimal routes where VOCs and damage are minimized and also objectively calculate the effect of these road conditions on their income. Road owners can evaluate the effect of different levels of construction and maintenance quality control on the outcome of these actions and the general transportation costs and deterioration rates of the infrastructure as affected by riding quality/road roughness. Recommendations The following recommendations are made based on the information provided and discussed in this report: The models and relationships in the report should be evaluated for incorporation into the appropriate Caltrans economic models, to enable modeling of the effects of riding quality and deterioration of riding quality over time on economic models. Analysis of the effect of construction and maintenance quality control using local maintenance options and their effects on the riding quality of roads should be evaluated to enable appropriate control levels to be determined. The effects of riding quality bonus-penalty schemes, and the effect of initial riding quality on the long-term performance of local roads, should be incorporated into an overall transportation infrastructure model. Further studies on the damage determination of transported agricultural produce at a range of frequencies caused by various riding quality truck combinations using laboratory-based bulk density measurements should be conducted (similar to the tomato tests discussed in this report)

Impact of post-event avoidance behavior on commercial facilities sector venues-literature review.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11), focused a great deal of interest and concern on how individual and social perceptions of risk change behavior and subsequently affect commercial sector venues. Argonne conducted a review of the literature to identify studies that quantify the direct and indirect economic consequences of avoidance behaviors that result from terrorist attacks. Despite a growing amount of literature addressing terrorism impacts, relatively little is known about the causal relationships between risk perception, human avoidance behaviors, and the economic effects on commercial venues. Nevertheless, the technical and academic literature does provide some evidence, both directly and by inference, of the level and duration of post-event avoidance behaviors on commercial venues. Key findings are summarized in this Executive Summary. Also included as an appendix is a more detailed summary table of literature findings reproduced from the full report

A multi-echelon supply chain model for strategic inventory assessment through the deployment of kanbans

Thesis (M. Eng. in Logistics)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-102).As global competition in the manufacturing space grows, so do corporations' needs for sophisticated and optimized management systems to enable continuous flows of information and materials across the many tiers within their supply chains. With the complexities introduced by the variability in the demand for finished goods as well as by the variability in lead-time of transportation, procurement, production and administrative activities, corporations have turned to quantitative modeling of their supply chains to address these issues. Based on the data of a heavy machinery manufacturer headquartered in the US, this research introduces a robust model for the deployment of strategic inventory buffers across a multi-echelon manufacturing system. Specifically, this study establishes a replenishment policy for inventory using a multiple bin, or Kanban, system for each part number in the assembly of products from our sponsors tractor line. We employ a numerical simulation to evaluate and optimize the various inventory deployment scenarios. Utilizing several thousand runs of the simulation, we derive a generalized treatment for each part number based on an econometric function of the parameters associated with lead-time, order frequency, inventory value and order costing. The pilot for the simulation focuses on the parts data for three earthmoving products across eight echelons, but scales to n products across m echelons. Our results show that this approach predicted the optimal quantities of Kanbans for 95% of parts to a level of accuracy +/- 3 bins.by Philip J. Hodge and Joshua D. Lemaitre.M.Eng.in Logistic