Environmental impact of sharing inland transportation in a dry port system

This paper studies the shared transportation service provided by a dry port [1][2] to the shippers it serves. A hinterland supply chain is considered with one dry port and multiple shippers locating in close proximity to the dry port. The dry port employs for-hire trucking companies who provide the necessary equipment for executing the transportation services. To illustrate the scenario, products are manufactured at a constant rate at each shipper. The dry port adopts milk-run logistics to pick up the products from shippers. A milk-run cycle starts by dispatching an empty truck from the dry port followed by loading the shippers´ products at the first stop. The truck then visits a number of other shippers´ manufacturing plants, repeating the process at each shipper before returning to the dry port. Finally, cargoes stored at the dry port are consolidated and delivered to the seaport in fixed time intervals.