A pragmatic approach to evaluate optimisation strategies in road freight transportation

Abstract

Road freight is one of the most common means of inland transportation in Africa. Other forms include rail, air and marine transport. Road freight use has grown due to the increase in cross-border trade. This increased economic activity has put a strain on the road infrastructure and processing procedures at various checkpoints along the trade routes. Consequently, a number of bottlenecks have surfaced along the transportation corridors. In response, individual efforts have been and are still being made by the relevant stakeholders to improve the status quo. Most of them involve the use of communication technology. Examples include electronic declarations, e-tolling and one-stop border posts. Post-implementation results show little or no improvement in corridor efficiency. This implies that more detailed studies are required before deployment of proposed solutions. In this paper the results of a pragmatic approach to evaluate improvement strategies in overload control are presented. This approach is multi-dimensional. It looks at all the role players and how they would be affected or respond to the deployed system. The method employed is primarily based on the modelling of activities, processes and the responses from stakeholders and simulating various scenarios in Simio. The impact of the WIM threshold level, nature of the charging system, and extent of data sharing among stakeholders on the corridor are shown and discussed.