About 25 scientists research, work and teach at the Institute of Transport Logistics (ITL), in the fields of traffic and transportation logistics, distribution logistics and logistics management. The scientists of ITL develop customized solutions as well as innovative scientific approaches for logistics practice, with focus on the optimization of logistics nodes (forwarding agencies and KEP-terminals, container terminals, distribution centers, cross docks). Simulation thereby is an important method.

The possibilities for optimization at forwarding agencies are on the one hand the organization of transport and on the other hand the handling of cargo. About 25% of costs are allocated to the handling processes in the terminal building. In particular the main part of these costs, the costs for personnel, can directly be influenced by changing the process management. The goal is to find a long-term approach of optimization, because the handling processes as interface between long and short distance traffic are an integral part of Less than Truck load (LTL) transportation. Due to high failure potential of manual processes dynamic changes should be avoided.The low transparency of the processes is the main challenge for the optimization. Hence the current situation is modeled in a simulation model first to get characteristic figures about the process chain. Therefore the simulation suite ED TransSim is used which was developed together with INCONTROL especially for forwarding agencies. ED TransSim simulates yard processes as well as the handling processes in the terminal building.

Based on the current situation, several scenarios will be done with changes on the allocation of trucks to doors and/or the allocation of destinations to the internal buffer areas. Tests like this would directly lead to loss of quality in the real system. Simulation enables quantitive comparison between variants and helps to convince the personnel of the feasibility of alteration. In that way the suggestions of variants of all participants can be tested and compared. Due to changes in the allocation of destination to internal buffer areas 11% of the daily transport performance could already be saved. But this is only one aspect. More important is that the reduction of handling times for inbound shipments leads to earlier cut-off-times for the local distribution trucks so that they can reach one more customer for instance. Because of the high complexity, this can only be simulated within the special simulation environment ED TransSim-Node. The 11% transport reduction could already realize about 30 minutes earlier departure per truck, which was confirmed in reality. By 65 tours per day this implies a potential of 32 hours per day for optimization of the local transport planning department.

Arrivals of shipments during a week