Recent surveys indicate that transportation companies are not utilizing technology in decision making despite growing complexity of transportation systems. This paper aims to present a discrete simulation approach to benchmarking performance measures of terminal operations of less‐than‐truckload (LTL) freight carriers.
The methodology involves design of heuristics for the dock assignment problem and uses discrete event simulation to evaluate performance of the various heuristics.
Intelligent dock assignment for incoming trailers can greatly improve performance of LTL terminals and simulation is an effective tool to determine the effects of various assignments on terminal performance.
The paper introduces a dock assignment heuristic and integrates the tactical level decision‐making process and operational aspects in LTL terminals to evaluate the performance of the system. A case study is used to demonstrate the use of the heuristic and performance improvements.
