Supervisors in a less-than-truckload freight terminal establish material flows inside the terminal by assigning incoming trailers to open doors. A common scheduling strategy is to look ahead into the queue of incoming trailers and assign them to doors to minimize worker travel. We develop a model of the resulting material flows and use it to construct layouts that exploit this type of schedulin...

Tactical planning of operations is comprised of a set of interrelated decisions that aim to ensure an optimal allocation and utilization of resources to achieve the economic and customer service goals of the company. Tactical planning is particularly vital for intercity freight carriers that make intensive use of consolidation operations. Railways and less-than-truckload motor carriers are typi...

Freight transportation is a major component of logistical operations. Due to the increase in global trade, fierce competition among shippers and raising concerns about energy, companies are putting more emphasis on effective management and usage of transportation services. This paper studies the transportation pricing problem of a truckload carrier in a setting that consists of a retailer, a tr...

For an LTL (Less-than Truckload) carrier, the allocation of doors at a consolidation facility to outbound trailers assigned to various destinations, and to inbound trailers in the continuous stream arriving from various origins, has a significant impact on its operations, and on the nightly man-hours needed for consolidation. In the past literature door allocations to destinations of outbound t...