In the late 1990s, early 2000s, academic literature considered electronic marketplaces as a game changer in truck transportation services procurement. Early enthusiasm was followed by skepticism regarding e-marketplaces' usefulness and the popularity of e-marketplaces appeared to wane both in industry and in academic literature. However, recent sources argue that almost half of the freight currently transported by truck in the USA is subject to transactions conducted in e-marketplaces. This dissertation intends to fill a gap in the academic literature by showing that truck transportation e-marketplaces necessitate renewed dedicated research efforts, by exploring the strategies implemented by e-marketplaces in this specific industry and by linking these strategies to marketplaces' performance. First, transportation and non-transportation e-marketplaces are compared in chapter 2 with regard to their usage of mechanisms designed to generate trust among users. Results show that truck transportation e-marketplaces use these trust mechanisms differently than non-transportation e-marketplaces, which supports a call for research on e-marketplaces in the specific context of truck transportation services procurement. In chapter 3, a database inventorying the usage of 141 features by 208 e-marketplaces is then created to initiate the empirical exploration of these specific e-marketplaces. Thanks to that database, a new typology (a way of classifying objects based on several simultaneous classification criteria) is developed in chapter 4 that identifies three main truck transportation e-marketplace strategies (two with sub-divided into two sub-strategies). The typology provides a state of industry and puts in perspective the specificity of truck transportation e-marketplaces with regard to their structure along 11 dimensions known to the general e-marketplace literature. Finally, the link between e-marketplace strategies and performance is investigated in chapter 5. Performance is measured with three traffic metrics: number of unique visitors per day, number of page views per day, and website ranking. Results show that third-party-owned e-marketplaces that provide auction mechanisms with a fairly high level of user decision and transaction support are more successful than other e-marketplaces. This dissertation provides a picture of existing e-marketplaces for the procurement of truck transportation services, challenges components of existing theories and provides ground for further research. / Ph. D.

This research presents a rail transportation cost analysis of bulk agricultural commodities (such as grain and wood chips) with similar characteristics as pre-processed biomass. This study analyzes the cost factors that affect rail pricing for shipments of bulk-commodities (such as grain) from the Midwest to various regions in the US using regression analysis theories. The rail cost equations developed from the regression analysis were used to compare the trade-offs that exist between truck, rail and barge transportation of pre-processed biomass.

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This thesis presents a first real world case-study of road transport operations that use the COVER format, in which the driver and the vehicle are regarded as separate entities. This format enables a complex representation of the transport operation that potentially better describe reality compared to the conventional representation used in today’s certification tools. The representation of operations treated in this thesis is called Operating Cycles and has been used to fully describe three representative transport missions from a case-study truck. Stochastically generated operating cycles have been used to create a large data set and thus prevent overfitting of specific cycles. The Operating Cycle-representation allowed for fair comparison between vehicle designs and ultimately manifested a vehicle composition that reduced the fuel consumption by nearly 10% for the same kind of transport operations.

The master´s thesis deal with transportation costs occurred in distribution company. It analyses both the evidence and monitoring of the particular costs, and also the range and efficiency of the spent costs. The outcome of my thesis is proposal of the evidence and the methodics for costs´ evaluation during the physical distribution.