This Friday, we will initiate the SCL seminar series for this Fall. Graduate students interested in transportation, logistics, and supply chains are encouraged to attend...if you are interested in presenting, please contact Jessica or Ashlea.
Pizza and refreshments sponsored by The Logistics Institute.
Abstract: We develop an approach for analyzing how restricting rest (sleep) locations for long-haul truckers may impact operational productivity, given hours-of-service regulations. Productivity is measured by the minimum number of drivers required to feasibly execute a set of load requests over a known planning horizon. When drivers may stop for rest at any location, they are able to maximize utilization under regulated driving hours. When drivers may only stop for rest at certain discrete locations, drivers may suffer decreased utilization. The framework and results should be especially useful in the analysis of truck transportation of security-sensitive commodities, such as food products and hazardous materials, where there may exist strong external pressure to ensure that drivers rest only in secure locations to reduce risks of tampering. We consider first the case of shipping on a single transportation lane. Computational analysis on sample data sets indicates that when a small number of rest locations are located optimally, the productivity impact of restricting rest to a small number of discrete locations is likely to be small.
