Fuel consumption assessment in delivery tours to develop eco driving behaviour

Full text available for free at http://abstracts.aetransport.org/paper/index/id/3886/confid/18International audienceA report of the European Commission in 1998 identified various areas that can be explored to achieve a sustainable logistics. Among those areas, we discuss the reduction of fuel consumption by an eco-driving strategy. Eco-driving is often cited as a good practice to reduce fuel consumption and claim a potential of - 10% to - 20% of fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. Freight transportation by truck is one of the major contributors to CO2 emissions (14% of the grand total in France). However, assessing its potential in actual operations is not an easy task and to our best knowledge has never been done before on a comprehensive scale. There were no researches that were able to prove the efficiency of eco-driving in an operational freight transport context. To complement other researches that aim to bring a theoretical analysis to the link between the consumption and its impacting factors, this research is anchored in practice. Firstly it measures consumption on real situations. About 9000 tours were followed and analyzed. Secondly the significant fuel consumption factors are analysed. Third the importance of driving behaviour as one of the most important factors for reducing consumption is assessed. In this research, done in collaboration with a logistics services provider operating its own trucks fleet, we defined a measurement protocol implemented in 29 trucks. Then we were able to retain the fuel consumption and to link it to the context of the tour. Several incentives were tested to motivate truck drivers in order to reduce fuel consumption. This raises the question of the individual measurement and the evaluation of the driving behaviour improvement. In classical eco-driving models, the estimation of the eco-driving fuel consumption depending on the tour environment was often overlooked because of the complexity of the task. However it is required to build a new sustainable incentive system. The main contribution of this paper is to identify and to propose a new system that allows logistics service provider to evaluate driving behaviours and to share the eco driving individual gain as a new driver incentive method. As a result we propose a non linear model to estimate an interval of eco-driving consumption depending on tour environment factors like truck type, road type, speed, load and weather. By reporting the eco-driving strategy implemented in 3 different operational areas during 2 years, this research has enabled us to understand the benefits of the actions to reach fuel consumption and emissions reduction up to 4,2%. It shows here that eco driving strategy can be very efficient in an operational freight transportation environment. In this contribution we developed a first assessment of driving behaviour depending on the conditions of every tour. Thus this paper opens research opportunities in two directions; the first is the experimentation of this approach in different context. The second direction is the enhancement of the model to gain in precision or in robustness

Transport Items and Physical Internet Handling Boxes: a Comparison Framework Across Supply Chains

Pallets, cardboard boxes, and plastic crates are widely used tools to operate supply chains. As such they have many impacts on handling effort, shipment protection, transport mean utilization as well as repositioning and recycling efforts and they represent billions of assets spread all over the world. The historical and local origins of the designs and the sharing among many stakeholders do not ensure at all any kind of global optimization. The purpose of this paper is to define and explain a research effort to better measure and evaluate the efficiencies and inefficiencies for supply chain stakeholders for themselves and globally. When validated the framework will be sued to evaluate new designs on a global scale especially for the design of the handling box related to the Physical Internet concept

An inventory control model with interconnected logistic services for vendor inventory management

International audienceThis paper proposes an inventory control model taking advantage of interconnected logistic services in the Physical Internet for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector. Unlike current hierarchical inventory model where the source of each is pre-assigned, the goods are stored and distributed in an interconnected and open network of PI-hubs which enables storage capacity and transportation sharing among different companies around the network. As a result, theoretically, the suppliers can push their goods all around the network and the retailers can be served by any hub in the network. A non-linear global optimization inventory model to minimize the total logistic costs is proposed and a heuristic using simulated annealing is applied to solve the problem. Numerical experiments are taken to compare the performance of the proposed PI inventory model and classic inventory control model for different settings of a typical supply network. Results suggest that the PI inventory control model can always reduce the total logistic cost while reaching a comparable or improved end customer service level

A sharing mechanism for superadditive and non-superadditive logistics cooperation

International audienceThe lack of a stable, fair and generally applicable sharing mechanism is one of the most noticeable impediments to the implementation of logistics cooperation. Most of the current literature on the sharing mechanism in logistics cooperation focuses on superadditive logistics cooperation games, neglecting the probable occurrence of other types of games resulting from coordination cost and unequal partners. In this work, we propose a sharing model based on game theoretic solutions, taking account of the bargaining power of players to identify a fair in-Core allocation. Under full cooperation assumption, we generalize this model for non-superadditive logistics cooperation games with coordination costs at different levels. The games with empty Core are also studied within the model

Game theoretic contribution to horizontal cooperation in logistics

International audienceHorizontal cooperation in logistics was proved globally advantageous, but we see only few realizations until now. The main obstacle to the successful implementation of horizontal cooperation is the absence of appropriate cooperation decision making model, consisting of the detailed cooperation process, the optimization model, and the stable-and-fair gain sharing mechanism. In this paper, we propose a practical cooperation decision making model for the realization of horizontal logistics cooperation scheme. This model is a decision process integrating an optimization tool and a game-theoretic approach to find a feasible allocation rule, and stable coalitions related to coalition structures issue. We propose a weighted allocation rule that takes bargaining power, contribution and core stability into account, and generalize it in games with coalition structure. Then we investigate related stability issue under two different cooperation patterns. At the end, we present a case study of France retail supply network, which verifies the cooperation model we proposed

Less-than-truckload Dynamic Pricing Model in Physical Internet

International audienceThis paper investigates a decision-making problem consisting of less-than-truckload dynamic pricing (LTLDP) under Physical Internet (PI). PI can be seen as the interconnection of logistics networks via open PI-hubs, which can be considered as spot freight markets where LTL requests of different volume/destination continuously arrive over time for a short-stay. Carriers can bid for the requests by using short-term contract. This paper proposes a dynamic pricing model to optimise carrier’s bid price to maximise his expected profits. Three influencing factors are investigated: requests quantity, carrier’s capacity and cost. The results provide useful guidelines to carriers on pricing decisions in PI-hub

Allocation of Transportation Cost & CO2 Emission in Pooled Supply Chains Using Cooperative Game Theory

International audienceThe sustainability of supply chain,both economical and ecological, has attracted intensive attentions of academic and industry. It is proven in former works that supply chain pooling given by horizontal cooperation among several independent supply chains create a new common supply chain network that could reduce the costs and the transport CO2 emissions. In this regard, this paper introduces a scheme to share in a fairly manner the savings. After a summary of the concept of pooled-supply-networks optimization and CO2 emission model, we use cooperative game theory as the cooperative mechanism for the implementation of the horizontal pooling. Since we proved the related pooling game to be super-additive, a fair and stable allocation of common gain in transportation cost and CO2 emission is calculated by Shapley Value concept. Through a case study, the results show that supply chains pooling can result in reductions of both transportation cost and carbon emissions, and that the increase of carbon-tax rate gives enterprises more incentives for the implementation of such pooling scheme

Modular Design of Physical Internet Transport, Handling and Packaging Containers

This paper proposes a three‐tier characterization of Physical Internet containers into transport, handling and packaging containers. It first provides an overview of goods encapsulation in the Physical Internet and of the generic characteristics of Physical Internet containers. Then it proceeds with an analysis of the current goods encapsulation practices. This leads to the introduction of the three tiers, with explicit description and analysis of containers of each tier. The paper provides a synthesis of the proposed transformation of goods encapsulation and highlights key research and innovation opportunities and challenges for both industry and academia

Modeling and analysis of alternative distribution and Physical Internet schemes in urban area

Urban logistics is becoming more complicated and costlier due to new challenges in recent years. Since the main problem lies on congestion, the clean vehicle is not necessarily the most effective solution. There is thus a need to redesign the logistics networks in the city. This paper proposes a methodology to evaluate different distribution schemes in the city among which we find the most efficient and sustainable one. External impacts are added to the analysis of schemes, including accident, air pollution, climate change, noise, and congestion. An optimization model based on an analytical model is developed to optimize transportation means and distribution schemes. Results based on Bordeaux city show that PI scheme improves the performances of distribution

Functional Design of Physical Internet Facilities: A Road-rail Hub

As part of the 2010 IMHRC, Montreuil, Meller and Ballot enumerated the type of facilities that would be necessary to operate a Physical Internet (PI, π), which they termed, “π-nodes.” This paper is part of a three-paper series for the 2012 IMHRC where the authors provide functional designs of three PI facilities. This paper covers a PI road-rail hub. The purpose of a PI road-rail node is to enable the transfer of PI containers from their inbound to outbound destinations. Therefore, a road-rail π-hub provides a mechanism to transfer π-containers from a train to another one or a truck or from a truck to a train. The objective of the paper is to provide a design that is feasible to meet the objectives of this type of facility, identify ways to measure the performance of the design, and to identify research models that would assist in the design of such facilities. The functional design is presented in sufficient detail as to provide an engineer a proof of concept