Success Story Logistics

Intelligent Tour Scheduling

The core task of a freight company is to plan, organize and carry out the transportation of a large number of shipments of varying sizes, shapes and changing loading and destination points. Since most shipments do not completely fill a truck, they must be combined with other shipments and bundled into loads. To ensure that truck capacity utilization is as high as possible and empty capacities are avoided as much as possible, the organization of the tours poses a particular challenge. With intelligent planning, unnecessary trips and thus CO2 emissions can be cut and costs reduced.

The Case

• When transporting goods by truck, a large number of consignments with different dimensions, origins and destinations, and different loading time windows have to be bundled into tours.
• When scheduling, the main aim is to avoid empty truck capacities and minimize transport costs. Other important factors are, for example, the maximum load (weight, shape, size, restriction on hazardous goods), punctual delivery and, above all, legally regulated driving and working times for the drivers.
• In practice, only just under three-quarters of truck loading capacity is utilized through manual dispatching. In other words, 25 % of the capacity remains unused!