Opportunities for backloading as a logistics measure to improve freight sustainability

摘要: Freight in Australia travels long distances between cities and regional centres, leading to high costs for many critical commodities and to high transport emissions. To improve their sustainability, freight operators often use higher productivity vehicles, multi-modal transport where available and efficient logistics practices. One such practice is to optimise freight routes, including minimising empty return trips. However, while such practice is possible for operators who service their own fleet, it can be a challenge for others, especially those who service many customers that rapidly change over time, those who operate over long distances with uncertainty in arrival times, or those transporting commodities that require specialised vehicles. Understanding the potential for non-empty return opportunities at the national level could benefit such stakeholders.To this end, the work presented in this paper estimates the capacity for trucks to return with a payload, including less than truckload, to their origin location based on information available in TraNSIT (Transport Network Strategic Investment Tool)(Higgins et al., 2018). A model, named backloading model, was added to TraNSIT. It uses a mix of heuristics, based on domain expertise, and optimisation techniques, and provides metrics that quantify opportunities at the national level for various truck/trip categories, as well as information regarding round-trip opportunities. For example, next trip opportunities for refrigerated trucks were found for about 50% of the trips that are less than 400km and trips that are over 1,200 km, while the container fleet had the best next trip opportunities for trips over 400km. Round-trip …