Civil and Environmental Engineering Commons^™

Impact Of Rfid Information-Sharing Coordination Over A Supply Chain With Reverse Logistics, Juan Jose Nativi Nicolau

Open Access Dissertations

Companies have adopted environmental practices such as reverse logistics over the past few decades. However, studies show that aligning partners inside the green supply chain can be a substantial problem. This lack of coordination can increase overall supply chain cost. Information technology such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has the potential to enable decentralized supply chain coordinate their information. Even though there are research that address RFID on traditional supply chain, few researches address how to coordinate RFID information sharing in a green supply chain. We study, through simulation experiments, two types of RFID information-sharing coordination under different configurations related …

Safety Performance Prediction Of Large-Truck Drivers In The Transportation Industry, Emily Moneka Francis Xavier

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The trucking industry and truck drivers play a key role in the United States commercial transportation sector. Accidents involving large trucks is one such big event that can cause huge problems to the driver, company, customer and other road users causing property damage and loss of life. The objective of this research is to concentrate on an individual transportation company and use their historical data to build models based on statistical and machine learning methods to predict accidents. The focus is to build models that has high accuracy and correctly predicts an accident. Logistic regression and penalized logistic regression models …

Value Focused Inland Waterway Infrastructure Investment Decisions, Othman Boudhoum

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Maritime transportation functions as the backbone of world trade. The U.S. inland waterway transportation system is comprised of 12,000 miles of navigable waterways that connect and move freight between the global supply chain and thirty eight States. When investing in inland waterway infrastructure, we should aim to maximize all benefits associated with the investment including flood protection, water supply, hydropower generation, recreation, and environmental impact benefits. We formulate an initial qualitative value model for the inland waterway infrastructure investment decision based on a value-focused thinking approach which allows us to holistically evaluate project investment alternatives. Given limited resources, a portfolio …

Parameterizing Analytical Models To Support An Empirically Based Warehouse Design Methodology, Lisa Thomas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research in the area of warehouse design is characterized by a myriad of analytical models that address one, typically small and isolated, area of the warehouse. These models, although important in gaining insight into one question of warehouse design, are of limited value when one considers the larger question of overall warehouse design. Thus, research in the area of overall warehouse design typically consists of procedure-driven processes based on qualitative factors and not the quantifiable results of analytical models.

In contrast, practitioners have significant empirical data related to how a design alternative performs in an industry, a company, or a …

Optimization Models And Algorithms For Truckload Relay Network Design, Hector Andres Vergara Arteaga

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Driver turnover is a significant problem for full truckload (TL) carriers that operate using point-to-point (PtP) dispatching. The low quality of life of drivers due to the long periods of time they spend away from home is usually identified as one of the main reasons for the high turnover. In contrast, driver turnover is not as significant for less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers that use hub-and-spoke transportation networks which allow drivers to return home more frequently. Based on the differences between TL and LTL, the use of a relay network (RN) has been proposed as an alternative dispatching method for TL transportation …

Integrated Planning For Rural Rail Transportation, Jeffrey Cohan Gwaltney

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Population growth in rural areas has led to new interest in rail transportation. Planning a passenger rail system involves numerous difficult decisions, most representing a trade-off between customer service and cost. In this work, we attempt to integrate many of these planning decisions. We consider strategic decisions such as station location and vehicle procurement, as well as tactical issues that include vehicle scheduling. Our integrated model exploits the linear network structure that best suits many rural American communities, including Northwest Arkansas. Due to the intractability of the integrated rail planning problem, we have developed a customized heuristic approach to solve …