The study of choice behaviour in freight transport faces a number of challenges and difficulties which set it part from the study of choice behaviour in passenger transport. One factor responsible for this phenomenon is the far greater complexity of freight transport systems, mainly resulting from the enormous diversity of commodity and firm characteristics. Moreover, in contrast to passenger transport, freight choice behaviour has not concentrated in a single agent but rather, especially in recent years, distributed jointly over multiple individuals and firms in a logistical chain. Using conceptual and methodological approaches developed in the passenger sector while ignoring the influence of supply chain and logistics concepts, as found in almost all existing freight demand studies, is therefore inappropriate to represent freight agents’ choice behaviours in this evolving supply chain environment.

This research aims to develop a realistic solution to enhance the efficiency of a transport logistics operation. The case study in this research is one of the largest agricultural suppliers in Northern Thailand. The cost of logistics in Thailand is relatively high compared to other countries, i.e. 11% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2007, and is particularly high in agricultural sector. The focus of the study is to enhance and improve transportation activities which typically account for the largest cost in logistics. The research is entitled ‘RFID enabled constraint based scheduling for transport logistics ’ The dissertation studies two important research components: 1) the data acquisition using Radio Frequency Identification Technology (RFID) for monitoring vehicles in a depot and 2) the scheduling by solving Constraint Satisfaction Optimisation Problem (CSOP) using Constraint Programming (CP). The scheduling problem of the research is to compose and schedule a fleet in which both private and subcontracting (outsourcing) vehicles are available, but to minimise the use of subcontractors. Several contributions from this study can be identified at each stage of the study ranging from extensively reviewing the literature, field studies, developing the RFID prototype system for vehicle tracking, modelling and solving the defined scheduling problems using Constraint Programming, developing a RFID-CP based real time scheduling, and validating the proposed methods. A number of validations are also carried out throughout the research. For instance, laboratory based experiments were conducted to measure the performance of the developed RFID tracking system in different configurations. Scenario tests were used to test the correctness of the proposed CP-based scheduling system, and structure interviews were used to collect feedbacks on the developed prototype from the case study company.