2-7: Cargo Consolidation, Routing, and Location Optimization to Reduce Traffic Congestion by Minimizing Commercial Heavy Vehicle Trips

Traffic congestion is largely impacted by commercial vehicle trips. Therefore, reducing commercial heavy vehicle trips will improve mobility because commercial heavy vehicles, with their reduced acceleration and deceleration capacities compared to passenger cars, impact the traffic stream more than passenger cars. Mixed-cargo shipments combine multiple Less Than Truckload (LTL) shipments of different products, typically from different companies, that are traveling in the same vicinity into one full truckload shipment. Mixed-cargo shipments are an operational strategy that has gained traction in many industries because it reduces transportation costs while increasing asset utilization such as maximizing commercial heavy vehicle capacity. This practice achieves cost reductions and increased asset efficiency by reducing the number of trips that are needed to deliver the same volume of products among different companies. However, its implementation is far from optimal as it is often carried out by intuition and rudimentary operations leaving a substantial opportunity for process improvements. This project aims to develop a method to optimize the consolidation of cargo and the routing of shipments via commercial heavy vehicles along with the location of logistics activity centers/distribution centers to minimize the number of commercial heavy vehicle trips, while maximizing the utilization of transportation assets such as commercial heavy vehicles. This optimized method will deliver positive impacts on traffic congestion with the reduction of commercial heavy vehicle trips on transportation costs and asset investments.