Thursday, May 23, 2024 | 12:00 – 1:00 PM (ET)
Commercial heavy vehicles, with their reduced acceleration and deceleration capabilities compared to passenger cars, impact the traffic stream by increasing congestion. Therefore, reducing commercial vehicle trips will improve mobility.
Cargo consolidation -or mixed-cargo shipments- is an operational strategy that combines 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. Cargo consolidation 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 substantial opportunity for process improvements.
This work developed a methodology to optimize the consolidation of cargo and the routing of shipments of commercial heavy vehicles along with the location of logistics distribution centers to minimize distance, and the number of commercial heavy vehicle trips, while increasing the utilization of these transportation assets. The methodology includes public, and private sector insights stemmed from a survey and interviews, fusion and merging of different data sets pertaining to real-world private sector operations, and mathematical models and heuristics.
Results show positive impacts on traffic congestion by reducing total vehicle-miles(kilometers) traveled, and the number of commercial heavy vehicle trips, which translates in less heavy vehicles on the road.
About the Presenters:
Dr. Seckin Ozkul, P.E. is an Assistant Professor and the founding director of the Supply Chain Innovation Lab at the School of Marketing and Innovation of the Muma College of Business at the University of South Florida (USF). He holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Auburn University, AL, a Master’s in Engineering from USF, a Master of Science in Marketing with Supply Chain Management concentration from USF, and a Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering with emphasis on commercial heavy vehicle operations from the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Dr. Ozkul’s expertise is in supply chain optimization and logistics modeling, economic impacts of supply chain modeling, operations management, logistics activity center location/site selection optimization as well as freight mobility and planning. He is the Committee Chair of National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Transportation Research Board (TRB) Freight Transportation Economics and Regulation (AT010) Committee and the Committee Secretary of TRB’s Urban Freight Transportation (AT025) committee. He is a fellow of the International Road Federation (IRF) and a registered professional engineer (P.E.) in the state of Florida. He was recently reappointed to the Florida Freight Advisory Committee, which advises the state of Florida on freight-related priorities, issues, projects, and funding.
Dr. Monsreal is a full-time Senior Research Scientist at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI). Dr. Monsreal possesses 15+ years of project management experience in the private and public sector and 10+ years of hands-on and managing experience in logistics and supply chain operations in companies such as Coca-Cola BEPENSA (Beverages Industry), Reckitt & Colman (Retail and FMCG Industry), Holcim (Cement Industry) and FEMSA-Heineken (Beverages Industry), among others.
Dr. Monsreal holds a Ph.D. (CUM LAUDE), and a Master of Engineering in Logistics and Supply Chain Management from the Zaragoza Logistics Center-University of Zaragoza, Spain. within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Zaragoza Logistics Center, International Logistics Program. He holds a second Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering: Strategic Planning in Engineering and Technology, from the High Management Center of Engineering and Technology (CADIT), Northern Anáhuac University, México, and a Postdoctorate from Universität Bremen – Institut für Seeverkehrswirtschaft und Logistik (ISL), Germany
He has been the technical lead for European projects at the Auto Identification Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Global Scale Network Center – Zaragoza Logistics Center (ZLC), Spain. He also had responsibilities as manager for Latin American projects within the same institution (ZLC). He was the Director of the Latin-American Center of Logistics Innovation-México (CLI-México) and was a researcher at the Institut für Seeverkehrswirtschaft und Logistik (ISL), Germany.
During his time at the private sector Dr. Monsreal managed large operations with markets of over 20 million people, with 35 distribution centers and warehouses, 12+ production plants, and thousands of clients/points of delivery. These operations entailed planning and decision-making related to multi-modal, short- and long-haul and last-mile transportation, facility location and investments, and supply chain network design.
At TTI, Dr. Monsreal´s work involves fluidity and multi-modal freight flow analyses, and identification of current and new data sources, data generation and data merging tasks for which he has contributed to develop new methods, and new approaches. He´s also highly experienced and trained in logistics operations, supply chain network, long-haul, first and last-mile planning, demand planning and forecasting, inventory management, reverse logistics, risk assessment in global supply chains, urban distribution, tracking and tracing AutoID integrated systems, order variability, routing schemes, data coding and standardization, and logistics corridors.
He is currently member and the Research Needs Statement lead of the Freight Transportation Data Committee of the Transportation Research Board of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
