The University of Toledo University Transportation Center : UTUTC-SC-9: Combined Truck Routing and Driver Scheduling Problems Under Hours-of-Service Regulations - Phase II

Focus Area: Support Chains

Principle Investigator:

Dr. Hokey Min
James R. Good Chair in Supply Chain Strategy
Department of Management
College of Business Administration
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio
419.372.3442
hmin@bgsu.edu

Abstract:

Despite constant controversy surrounding a series of the amendments for hours-of-service (HOS) regulations, its basic tenets and rules still remain the same. Although little or no change in the new HOS regulations may be a welcome sign for many trucking firms, its managerial efficiency is still unknown to them. To measure their efficiency, this project compares differences in transportation costs and productivity between the pre-HOS regulations and post-HOS regulations. In particular, this project will evaluate the improvement made by the proposed model and its solution procedures (e.g., simulated annealing techniques) developed at Phase I for solving time-dependent truck routing and scheduling problems within the time windows created by the new HOS regulations and then assess the extent of improvement over the conventional truck route structures and schedules under the pre-HOS regulations. In so doing, this project also develops a model-based decision support system (DSS) that will aid traffic managers in automating the routine tasks of routing their trucks and scheduling their drivers without much of human interventions or errors. Furthermore, the practicality of the proposed DSS will be validated by applying it to the real-world truck routing and driver scheduling problems encountering regional common carriers such as the Nagle Trucking Line based in Walbridge, Ohio.