Why freight planning

Rough planning provides estimates of both available transport capacity and required transport capacity in a given period of time. Those responsible for freight planning can use these estimates to see how much transport capacity is available to them, how much they need, and, if necessary, arrange additional capacity from their carriers.

The transport capacity requirement overviews are based on aggregated volume, weight, and floor space figures of selected freight orders for a time span defined by the user. The volume, weight, and floor space figures can be presented in selected measuring units. You can print daily, weekly, and monthly requirement reports over a selected period.

You can also display the overviews in a chart. Load Building is the core functionality of Freight. The primary purpose of load building is to plan the transportation of goods from your warehouse to the customer, from your supplier to your warehouse, or from a supplier directly to your customer, in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. Alternatively, you can employ this functionality for goods movements between your warehouses, or from warehouse to production environment and vice versa.

The load building engine creates a load plan from a range of freight orders and freight order lines selected by the user. A load plan consists of a number of loads. Each load consists of a number of shipments. The load building engine offers various planning options and three basic planning methods. Shipments that partially travel the same route are combined.

Multiple fixed addresses, such as distribution centers, ports, and so on, are visited. The transport route usually consists of several legs. At one of the legs, shipments travel the same way and are pooled together to go to their destination or to a distribution point. At the distribution point, the shipments are reallocated to various means of transport to be taken to their final destination.

For example, a shipment of 50 bicycles is sent from Amsterdam to New York, another shipment of 50 goes from Amsterdam to Philadelphia, and a third shipment of 20 bicycles goes from Amsterdam to Pittsburgh. The first leg of the transport route is from Amsterdam to Rotterdam.

Rotterdam is the pooling point, where the bicycles are loaded aboard a ship. At the distribution point in New York, they are unloaded from the ship and reloaded onto trucks that take them to their respective final destinations in New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh.

The Load Building module provides a Gantt chart that gives a timeline overview of loads and shipments as well as a capacity overview of resources: transport means groups , transport means combinations , and means of transport.

This free one-day workshop is designed for professionals tackling freight issues at metropolitan planning organizations, state departments of transportation, local governments, and economic development agencies. The workshop focuses on building a better understanding of the value of freight stakeholder input to the public sector planning process, identifying freight stakeholders, and engaging freight stakeholders in the planning process.

Participants should be familiar with freight terminology, issues, and trends before taking this workshop. Participants may consider attending the National Highway Institute course , "Integrating Freight in the Transportation Planning Process" to prepare for the workshop.

A list of additional training opportunities is available at www. And over time, FACs can spearhead efforts to include freight in all aspects of transportation planning. Delaware Valley Goods Movement Task Force supports freight mobility improvements in 9 counties, 4 cities, and municipalities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. For more information, visit www. Its early accomplishments include identification of the Florida Strategic Network and projects for fast-track status, development of recommendations for the Florida Statewide Intermodal Systems Plan, and establishment of a methodology to prioritize freight projects.

Baltimore, MD Freight Movement Task Force focuses on improving communications among public and private sector freight stakeholders; identifying short-term impediments to and recommending improvements for the efficient, effective, environmentally sensitive, and safe movement of freight; and providing input into the allocation of long-term transportation resources for freight.

Some of its major accomplishments include the completion of a Truck Parking Study along the I corridor in the Baltimore region, development of a new truck traffic-forecasting model, placement of new signage along major freight routes, and intersection improvements to help mitigate freight bottlenecks in the Baltimore region.

Jocelyn Jones Jocelyn. Jones fhwa. In general, serving local businesses and homes in cities is inefficient mainly because of multiple — non consolidated — deliveries to many destinations and also because of the constraints on routing and scheduling posed by restrictions to certain routes or time periods.

Besides, home deliveries is even more inefficient due to several reasons, among which the spatial dispersion of residences and the frequency of failed deliveries [ 13 ].

UFT policy interventions sometimes grind to a halt or produce unintended results also due to the decision-making process adopted for their selection.

To produce long-lasting effects one should, coherently and co-ordinately, evaluate selected policies accounting for the pre-existing city planning framework. This paper proposes an innovative decision-making process for urban freight planning, easily transferable across cities and capable of jointly: a accounting for conceivable UFT measures applicable to the specific city culture, structure and their likely evolutions, b considering and involving all relevant stakeholders in the planning process, c integrating behavioural, technical, operational, organisational and financial issues.

Three distinct yet complementary phases constitute the backbone of the methodology, which is innovative since it is a well-thought-out combination of well-established methods in a single integrated methodological framework.

Outcomes of cutting-edge UFT research and innovative initiatives represent its main inspirations. More in detail:. This task is performed using info on city, stakeholders and freight characteristics. Subsequently, an ex-ante and context-specific policy ranking is defined via problem capture techniques cross-referenced to a policy database. The three-phase methodology is intended for experts to support local public authorities i.

The organisation of the paper is the following: section 2 reviews the state of the art of current approaches to UFT policy-making with a focus on recent and significant UFT innovative research streams and initiatives; section 3 presents the main elements and steps of the proposed methodological approach; section 4 derives relevant implications for UFT policy-making, discussing the potential of the integrated approach; section 5 concludes summarizing the main concepts.

The traditional planning approach related to urban transport relies on studying transport demand to find and support solutions mainly related to passenger mobility. This is, in fact, the predominant component of overall mobility while freight is often neglected [ 16 ].

Lately, a fast-growing awareness of the strategic importance UFT plays and the related negative impacts it causes at city level has produced an increase in the research efforts made to define and implement sustainable UFT solutions.

Over the past 15 years, a range of UFT research and innovation initiatives have proposed solutions to tackle the problems caused by urban freight deliveries e.

Several projects have also been devoted to collecting and deploying UFT best practices e. Nevertheless, there is a general lack of detailed knowledge needed to address UFT issues by local policy-makers and substantial opportunities for improvement still persist. In fact, a fair amount of UFT-related programmes has been characterised by a non-negligible failure rate.

This is mainly attributable to the insufficient commitment from relevant stakeholders. Involving stakeholders early on in the process, on the contrary, usually produces better results [ 21 ].

Unsatisfactory results also derive from research projects based on real-life implementations of innovative UFT solutions. Although many initiatives proved successful in pilots and demonstrations, large-scale adaptations did not take place. The reasons for failures differ. However, one common feature is that only few initiatives consider all stakeholders and jointly test all possible solutions. In some cases, the implementations terminate shortly after public funding comes to an end [ 11 ].

These considerations call for an in-depth investigation, often not performed, of the financial sustainability of the solutions proposed. Besides, innovative and well-grounded decision-support systems DSS are necessary to deal with the complexity characterising UFT environment and participatory decision-making. Three elements are fundamental and strictly interlaced to make a DSS effective and efficient: data, models and simulations. Under this respect, an innovative approach promotes the combination of disaggregate behavioural freight models e.

Behaviour change is an important aspect policy-makers should focus on to boost the success probability of the strategies adopted. This has a greater potential for improving the economic, social, and environmental performance of urban freight systems [ 8 ].

Gamification is gaining popularity in the mobility domain Footnote 5 e. However, to be effective, it needs to be appropriately conceived, deployed and managed. A user-centred, behaviourally consistent design approach is desirable.

This will maximise each agent-type engagement and behaviour change potential. In this respect, gamification can stimulate sustainable UFT behaviours. Considering all the discussed issues and concepts together, it is evident the need of a comprehensive and innovative approach to decision-making in urban freight planning.

City logistic profiles are acquired on the base of specific city, stakeholders and freight characteristics [ 14 ] that, all together, allow to define the root causes that produce the problems to be solved as explained in section 1 and the objectives the policy-maker should aim at.

The profiles characterise the logistic vocation, e. Then, thanks to scientific knowledge, problems are captured and cross-referenced with a policy database that draws on urban freight best practices, producing an ex-ante context-specific policy ranking. This compensates for the general lack of data representing one of the main factors hindering the development of next-generation UFT models which, in turn, may limit effective policy-making and operations management.

Scientific knowledge : it consists of performing and periodically updating a wide-ranging and well-structured scientific literature survey concerning UFT policy covering: measures, effects, controversial issues, interactions, etc.

This will provide a consistent, updated, interdisciplinary, relevant, possibly exhaustive mapping of the contributions appearing in scientifically well-respected journals. Urban freight best practices : measures adopted and goals expected from UFT real-life implementation are classified and evaluated according to: a temporal reference scale strategic, tactical, and operative , b decision-makers involved, c number and type of goals pursued. Policy database matching : it includes two activities: a creating an extensive and typified policy database based on the results obtained in EU-funded projects e.

A living lab is defined as a dynamic environment built to test project solutions in real-life contexts e. Following the living lab concept, the policies selected in phase 1 are refined adopting a collaborative governance model approach supporting their consideration for inclusion within SUMPs.

Stakeholder engagement : it is the prerequisite for a successful setup of a living lab environment [ 38 ] capable of producing jointly desirable solutions, departing from the consolidated Asian Development Bank methodology [ 39 ].

Actions needed are: a clarify stakeholder involvement purposes; b define stakeholders to involve; c motivate the previous point ; d discuss methods for achieving involvement; e explain who should organise the process. Integrated planning : it consists of coordinating spatial, temporal and technical planning activities to promote the achievement of the goals set. The process focuses on methods to integrate collaborative governance model outputs into SUMP while also considering the specific city planning status quo situation.

SUMP standard cycle [ 42 ] constitutes the starting point for the integration of different planning and stakeholder engagement activities. The objective is to collate a well-balanced set of integrated assessment methods capable of facilitating the coherent and successful deployment of effective, applicable and, possibly, financially sustainable solutions.

This set of activities could include a variety of tools both aimed at policy assessment points 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the list reported below and policy implementation with the final goal of promoting relevant behavioural changes points 5 and 6 :. It integrates actively acquired, behaviourally relevant observational data e. GPS and smartphones , producing unprecedented high quality and quantity datasets for model estimation and validation e.

Models allow performing specific assessment tasks, e. An example of the integration of stakeholders' behavioural analysis within the living lab approach can be found in [ 48 ]. Point b uses Business Model Canvas techniques [ 49 ], providing a clear overview of the most important costs, key resources and activities to exploit, necessary to assess financial viability of the solutions under evaluation. In this respect, the core areas of a Business Model i. Typical KPI related to UFT are increased load factor, reduced vehicle movements, but also financial, social and process indicators e.

Gamification : it facilitates behaviour change and is complementary to the planning phases. Gamification contributes to increase eco-logistics awareness e. Intelligent Transport Systems ITS : they improve logistics flows effectiveness high service levels and efficiency cost reduction while reducing negative externalities, and their potential effect should be taken into consideration during the evaluation phase [ 51 , 52 ]. If assessment results are not satisfactory, the process will go back to phase 2 to start a new cycle of the living lab approach and define different policy packages.

On the contrary, in case of satisfactory results, the process ends with the definition of an optimised policy mix, derived from a continuous refinement procedure where policies are evaluated via non-correlated and complementary evaluation tools. UFT policy-making is inherently complex. There are no simple solutions to complex problems. Different actors would need to collaborate and coordinate their actions to fine tune the methodology proposed with the aim of producing relevant results and practically demonstrate its flexibility, reliability, comprehensiveness and effectiveness.

In this respect, the living lab model, with different layers and feedback loops is fundamental to assure a continuous communication and coordination among actors and a step-by-step decision-making process. The potential of the proposed methodological approach, still to be practically demonstrated, should be contrasted with the approaches presently used.

It is important to underline that the methodological approach proposed in this paper innovates in the joint, coordinated and correctly sequenced use of well-accepted and developed techniques that have gained a substantial consensus among researchers and practitioners.

The main innovation of the methodological proposal in this paper lies in the selection, sequence and interconnected use of the techniques. This, in fact, innovates while using well-established tools. The main implication for policy-making is guaranteeing both positive impacts for society, short-term policy acceptability and long-term social, environmental and economic sustainability. The sequence of methods proposed, reported in Fig.