Improving the Reliability of Freight Transportation

This project will advance the frontier of knowledge in the area of freight reliability and efficiency. The purpose is to further develop methods for designing and operating freight logistics systems in ways that improve their efficiency and reliability. The work at University of Maryland (UMD) will especially emphasize operations at intermodal transfer terminals and the effects of dispatching decisions on system reliability. Additional reliability performance assessment tools will be developed to supplement and complement those being developed in the first-year freight reliability and efficiency project. The emphasis on highway mode-focused tools will be extended to a multi-modal environment and a much richer tie between the system-level, connection assurance analyses of UMD and the route and tour-level tools being developed by North Carolina State university (NC State). The anticipated outcomes and deliverables will be the following: (1) Tools and techniques that can be used to make effective decisions about freight logistics that improve both reliability and efficiency. The tools will be useful to government agencies, carriers, shippers, and other interested stakeholders (e.g., finance institutions). (2) Journal papers that present the tools and techniques developed. (3) A guide to the tools and techniques. (4) A final report that describes the results of the research effort. The aim is to provide tools that can be used by governmental agencies to determine the freight reliability impacts of capacity investment and operational decisions. The tools will also help shippers and carriers make better-informed decisions about routing, scheduling, real-time dispatching and fleet sizing, and they will help those stakeholders better understand how to counsel and guide those agencies to make investment decisions that truly benefit the freight community.