Study project (MPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2000. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Liner shipping supplies a frequent scheduled transport service between designated ports to meet the needs of importers and exporters. Those needs are becoming more specific as a result of increasing competition attributable to globalisation of trade while importers and exporters are requiring more exacting services from the liner operators. The elements of service which most concern the importers and exporters are obviously the costs they must bear for the conveyance of the cargo and the time taken for its delivery. In order to meet the requirements of importers and exporters and at the same time enable the operators of the services to remain in business in the face of increasing competition within the industry, liner shipping worldwide is undergoing major changes. These changes are intended to increase the economies of scale and to extend control of the liner operators over the landside transport services. A discussion on liner shipping and current developments is contained in Chapter 3. Liner shipping plays an indispensable role in the economy of South Africa because almost 50% by value of South African imports are containerised. That equates to 8% of South African imports by volume (Moving South Africa: 1998), although it must be borne in mind that some of the cargo moving through South African ports is ultimately destined for countries in SADC (Southern African Development Community). According to Drewry Shipping Consultants, containerised cargo worldwide has been growing at the rate of about 8% per annum since 1980 and the South African trade has experienced a similarly high growth. The actual transport of containers, by sea is only one of the elements in the transport logistics supply chain (TLSC) between exporters in one country and importers in another with which liner operators must concern themselves. A conceptual background explaining the entire TLSC is provided in Chapter 2. In that chapter, the TLSe is defined and two models are used to identify key elements of the TLSC as well as interaction between them. Inefficiencies existing in individual elements of the TLSC as well as suggested solutions to the underlying problems are discussed in Chapter 4. Emphasis is placed on the need to use information technology as a vehicle to integrate the individual elements of the TLSe and as a means of saving costs and time. A discussion of the economic benefits of an efficient TLSe is contained in Chapter 5, while Chapter 6 includes a discussion on local and regional developments that have a bearing on the efficiency of the TLSe. The conclusions of the study together with recommended action are contained in Chapter 7. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Lynvaart bied 'n gereeld geskeduleerde vervoerdiens tussen bepaalde hawens om in die behoeftes van in- en uitvoerders te voorsien. Weens toenemende mededinging voortspruitend uit die globalisering van handel, raak hierdie behoeftes egter al hoe veeleisender, terwyl in- en uitvoerders ook al hoe meer eise begin stel aan die gehalte van die diens wat deur lynvaartoperateurs gelewer word. Die elemente van hierdie diens waarby in- en uitvoerders die grootste belang het, is uiteraard die koste en die tyd verbonde aan vragverskeping. Om aan die vereistes van in- en uitvoerders te voldoen en dit terselfdertyd vir operateurs moontlik te maak om hul besighede te midde van toenemende mededinging in die industrie te bly bedryf, is die lynvaartbedryf wereldwyd besig om groot veranderinge te ondergaan. Hierdie veranderinge is bedoel om skaalvoordele te verbeter en lynvaartoperateurs se beheer oor vervoerdienste aan land uit te brei. Lynvaart en huidige ontwikkelinge in die bedryf word in Hoofstuk 3 bepreek. Lynvaart speel 'n onontbeerlike rol in Suid-Afrika se ekonomie omdat ongeveer 50% van die waarde van Suid-Afrika se invoere in houers vervoer word. Dit is gelyk aan 8% van Suid-Afrika se invoere per volume (Moving South Africa: 1998), alhoewel daar ook in gedagte gehou moet word dat 'n gedeelte van die vrag wat deur Suid-Afrikaanse hawens beweeg, uiteindelik bestem is vir lande in die SAOG (Suider-Afrikaanse Onwikkelingsgemeenskap). Volgense Drewry Skeepskonsultante, groei die vervoer van houerverskeping sedert 1980 teen 'n tempo van ongeveer 8% per jaar, en het die Suid-Afrikaanse handel 'n soortgelyke hoe groeikoers ondervind. Die werklike verskeping van houers is net een van die elemente in die vervoerlogistiekvoorsieningsketting (VL VK) tussen uitvoerders in een land en invoerders in 'n ander land waarmee lynvaartoperateurs rekening moet hou. 'n Konseptuele raamwerk wat die VLVK in die geheel verduidelik, verskyn in Hoofstuk 2. Die VLVK word ook in hierdie hoofstuk gedefinieer en twee modelle word gebruik om elemente daarvan asook die interaksie tussen daardie elemente te identifiseer. Die ontoereikendheid van individuele elemente van die VLVK asook moontlike oplossings vir die onderliggende probleme word in Hoofstuk 4 bespreek. Klem word geplaas op die noodsaaklikheid om informasietegnologie te gebruik om die individuele elemente van die VLVK te integreer ten einde tyd en koste te bespaar. Die ekonomiese voordele van 'n doeltreffende VLVK word in Hoofstuk 5 bespreek, terwyl Hoofstuk 6 handel oor plaaslike en streeksonwikkelinge wat die VLVK se doeltreffendheid beinvloed. Die gevolgtrek

With congestion, environmental Impact, and the price of oil becoming topics that influence businesses and individuals in a daily basis, measures need to be undertaken in order to accommodate the growing demand for freight transportation. By directing many of the trucks travelling along the National Highways Systems to the Marine Highway corridors developed by the U.S. Maritime Administrations, many of the problems can be addressed in the Short and Medium terms. In order to do so, Short Sea Shipping, through the use of Ro/Ro (Roll-on/Roll-off) Vessels, needs to be implemented. Although the environmental and congestion reducing benefits are considerable, the profitability of this transportation mode needs to be considered. A cost benefit analysis can determine the margin of profit, and attract investors and businesses. By developing a mathematical model that accounts the costs associated with transporting trucks along a particular corridor, the competitiveness of Short Sea Shipping can be determined. / by Alvaro Galletebeitia. / Thesis (M.S.C.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

In this thesis, we investigate synergies between participants in transportation and distribution systems and we explore collaborative approaches to exploit these synergies to reduce transportation and distribution costs. We study collaboration in two environments: truckload transportation and vendor management inventory replenishment. The first part of the thesis addresses the cost allocation problem of a collaborative truckload transportation procurement network. We study a logistics network where shippers identify collaborative routes with few empty truck movements to negotiate better rates with a common carrier. We investigate how to allocate the cost savings of these routes among the members of the collaboration. In the second part of the thesis, we investigate collaboration opportunities among carriers. When several carriers have to satisfy truckload transportation requests from various shippers, they may reduce their transportation costs by exchanging requests. First, we focus on computing the minimum cost to satisfy all requests. Next, we develop and analyze various exchange mechanisms that allow carriers to exchange requests in order to realize some of the potential costs savings. In the last part of the thesis, we study VMI replenishment. Simple cost allocation methods ignore synergies between the customers, due to their locations, usage rates, and storage capacities. As a result, the price charged to a customer for distribution does not represent the actual cost of serving that customer. We design a mechanism capable of computing a cost-to-serve for each customer that properly accounts for the synergies among customers.

This dissertation contains two topics in operations research. The first topic is to design a distribution network to facilitate the repeated movement of shipments from many origins to many destinations. A method is developed to estimate transportation costs as a function of the number of terminals and moreover to determine the best number of terminals. The second topic is to study dynamics of a buyer's behavior when the buyer can buy goods through both option contracts and a spot market and the buyer attempts to learn the probability distribution of the spot price. The buyer estimates the spot price distribution as though it is exogenous. However, the spot price distribution is not exogenous but is endogenous because it is affected by the buyer's decision regarding option purchases.

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Dissertation (MSc (Industrial Systems))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Industrial and Systems Engineering / unrestricted

This research addresses fleet-sizing for reusable containers that are used for protection, transportation, and storage of parts between a component plant and assembly plant. These reusable containers are often expensive and occupy a large amount of storage space when empty and full. Having a large container fleet comes with higher acquisition, maintenance, and storage costs, but decreases production down time caused by the lack of containers needed for storage. A quantitative model of these trade-offs will permit decision makers to maintain desired production levels at minimum cost. In this dissertation, the relationship between container fleet size and production down time caused by container shortages is researched. Utilizing both theoretical and empirical approaches, two analytical models that include relevant operational parameters and stochastic components are developed. The first is a container fleet sizing model, and the second model estimates production stoppages as a function of container fleet size. The formulas are shown to be accurate and provide decision makers with the tools to better plan and manage specific applications. The formulas also provide general insight into the factors that affect container fleet size and production stoppage due to container shortages. / Graduation date: 2012

This dissertation addresses problems arising in freight routing and scheduling where full truckload (FTL) and less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers are used to serve transportation needs. Each of the problems investigated in this dissertation tries to optimize/maximize consolidation to decrease system transportation costs by (1) carefully choosing the timing and path of freight and/or (2) introducing consolidation points. Approaches are proposed that enable effective planning and operation of freight routing and scheduling for large-scale transportation networks. Chapter 2 presents solution approaches for a shipper pickup and delivery planning problem faced by many large retailers to move freight from suppliers to distribution centers. Each shipment is moved either direct via a LTL carrier or possibly consolidated with other shipments and moved by one or two FTL routes. When using a FTL carrier, the shipper takes advantage of contracted lane rates that establish prices per mile for a truck operated between two locations that are significantly less than the comparable LTL price for shipping a full truckload. Consolidated FTL routes may each visit multiple shipment origins (supplier locations) and/or destinations (distribution center locations). Additionally, FTL routes may move shipments through a single crossdock facility en route. The challenge in this planning problem is to exploit as much as possible negotiated truckload lane rates and to judiciously make use of routes through crossdock facilities to consolidate shipments. The primary contributions of this section are that (1) an interesting new problem variant is introduced to the field of transportation and logistics that is important in practice and (2) the solution approach demonstrates that exploiting knowledge of the problem and solution structure to cleverly select subsets of path variables for evaluation during each iteration of an integer programming based local search heuristic is effective on path-based routing models. Chapter 3 evaluates how to route each customer shipment through a sequence of transfer terminals in a LTL carrier network. At each terminal stop, a shipment is unloaded from an inbound trailer and reloaded onto an outbound trailer. A load plan determines the specific sequence of terminal transfers to be used for freight moving between each origin and destination. The design of the load plan determines the linehaul transportation and handling costs required to serve customers. We develop an improved very large-scale neighborhood search heuristic for solving an integer programming model for load plan design. The main contributions of this section include (1) the investigation of the pros and cons of optimizing system-wide into a single destination versus optimizing freight for all destinations in a small region, and (2) a solution approach that can find load plans with costs 6 to 7\% lower than those used in practice, and can find 2.5 to 5\% additional cost savings using the same time budget when compared to an approach optimizing system-wide into a single destination. Chapter 4 addresses a strategic planning problem that extends the load plan design problem to consider terminal roles. We investigate two-stage approaches that first identify the set of transfer terminals and then develop the corresponding load plan. Computational results compare the terminals chosen as transfer facilities from the proposed integer programming based local search method with a traditional hub location formulation and a simple facility location formulation to depict the benefits gained from modeling additional information. The key contributions of this section are (1) the introduction of a new hub location problem variant incorporating freight dispatch timing and trailer transportation cost characteristics found in the LTL trucking industry and (2) a solution approach utilizing IP-based local search that demonstrates the importance of incorporating freight dispatch timing. Finally, Chapter 5 summarizes the main conclusions from this dissertation and discusses directions for further research.

A load plan specifies how freight is routed through a linehaul terminal network operated by a less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier. Determining the design of the load plan is critical to effective operations of such carriers. This dissertation makes contributions in modeling and algorithm design for three problems in LTL load plan design: (1) Refined execution cost estimation. Existing load plan design models use approximations that ignore important facts such as the nonlinearity of transportation costs with respect to the number of trailers, and empty travel beyond what is required for trailer balance that results from driver rules. We develop models that more accurately capture key operations of LTL carriers and produce accurate operational execution costs estimates; (2) Dynamic load planning. Load plans are traditionally revised infrequently by LTL carriers due to the difficulty of solving the associated optimization problem. Technological advances have now enabled carriers to consider daily load plan updates. We develop technologies that efficiently and effectively adjust a nominal load plan for a given day based on the actual freight to be served by the carrier. We present an integer programming based local search procedure, and a greedy randomized adaptive search heuristic; and (3) Stochastic load plan design. Load plan design models commonly represent origin-destination freight volumes using average demands, which do not describe freight volume fluctuations. We investigate load plan design models that explicitly utilize information on freight volume uncertainty and design load plans that most cost-effectively deal with varying freight volumes and lead to the lowest expected cost. We present a Sample Average Approximation approach and a variant of the method for solving the stochastic integer programming formulations.

Disruptions to the freight transportation system are costly due to freight's critical relationship to economic productivity. This research will analyze the current methods of estimating the economic impacts of disruptions to the freight transportation system. A review of existing literature will be conducted with the intent of finding methods that address different types of disruptions and impacts. Due to varying economic scopes and disruptions studied, the results will likely indicate a broad range of methodologies and trends. The results will be used to better understand the different approaches taken when quantifying the economic impacts of disruptions and therefore enable more informed policy, regulation and investment.

Seaborne container shipping plays a major and important role in the world transportation system and the global supply chain. Shipping lines have designed their product offering to shippers around providing regular calls at designated ports. This works well for most firms that operate on a just-in-time philosophy. The real costs of trade – the transport and other costs of doing business internationally – are important determinants of a country’s ability to participate fully in the world economy. This is an important indicator for port performance in a globalised economy; therefore, any inefficiency that increases costs must be addressed. This means that ports have to ensure very high productivity and efficiency levels so that ships have a quick turnaround. Clark et al., (2002) conclude that a 50% improvement in port efficiency can reduce shipping costs by about 12%. The general question that is studied in this research is: How can the Marine Services within the Port of Durban assist in reducing ship turnaround times? This study seeks to determine what role the marine services plays in ship turnaround. The analysis in this study will be to determine the source of delays and ways to improve on efficiency. The resultant improvement in efficiency should lead to a possible reduction in shipping costs. The Market Demand Strategy employed by Transnet in 2012 must be implemented in such a manner that it must not only address the current infrastructural backlogs but it must also endeavour to alleviate several logistic chain bottlenecks that tend to constrain the economy. When analysing 2010-2011 a worrying trend emerges that the average waiting times for ships at anchor has increased significantly and the time on the berth has also increased significantly despite a reduction in the number of ships calling to the port. This is partly due to the fact that much larger ships now arriving at the port and more crucially are working a larger number of containers per port call. However, there is still concern about the operational efficiency of the terminals in the port (Pier One and Durban Container Terminal). The Marine Operations service times have also increased marginally 1.23% (0.98 hours) but this is due to longer time required for berthing and sailing of larger ships. This study has clearly shown that the Marine Operations within the Port of Durban do not significantly impact on overall ship turnaround time. However, there are areas of improvement that can be implemented to ensure high service levels within the port. By increasing the tug fleet and ensuring adequate human resources, the service offering can immediately be improved. Extremely lengthy anchorage waiting times and high berth occupancy impact negatively on ship-owners, shippers, and the economy at large. The Port Authority must interrogate these areas to understand clearly what is driving these extended times and determine strategies and performance measures to mitigate these. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.