Road
Road transports are the oldest in history and started with exchanging goods between different communities’ millenniums ago. Till beginning of the 20th century moving goods was relying on horse, donkey, ox or camel towed vehicles. In some regions of the world this is still common practice and widely used.
The invention of gas and diesel engines in the late 19th century did change this mode very much. [Clausen 1998, pp. 105-110]
Within the last century bigger and bigger trucks have been developed carrying the multiple payloads of the animal towed vehicles. Payloads today can be more than 100t like the “Australian Road Trains (3+ trailers linked to one towing unit)” and reaching operating speeds from 80 – 100 km/h. [Vahrenkamp 2005, pp. 251-270]
According to the development of trucks huge investments in infrastructure have been done within the last decades. A vast network of paved roads and multilane highways is connecting the human agglomerations now.
Today, trucks are standardized in certain areas like Europe or North America based on legal regulations and traffic rules. The advantage of using trucks for transport of goods is the high flexibility and independency from set schedules. [Clausen 1998, pp. 105-110]
In general, trucks can go where ever a road connection is and can deliver shipments to a specific receiver at a place of choice. The disadvantage of trucks, however, is the limited payload. In the European Union, it is 25t – 30t with a gross weight of 40t to 44t.
Even trucks can be directed independently they are depending on public infrastructure where unpredictable obstacles and delays can occur. National logistics networks are built on truck transports. Those networks include hubs and terminals for either consolidation or separation for local distribution.[Vahrenkamp 2005, pp. 251-270]
There are also direct transports from shipper to receiver. Those shipments are called part truck loads (LTL) or full truck loads (FTL). [Clausen 1998, pp. 105-110]
For collection and delivery of smaller shipments on the collection as well as on the delivery side of the long haul hubs are put in place. Pick-up and delivery are mostly organized in milk run.[Clausen 1998, pp. 105-110]
Trucks for delivery and collection are normally smaller ones with certain equipment allowing loading and unloading also in places which are not prepared for.[Clausen 1998, pp. 105-110]
Use case 3 will describe the task, activities, participants and their role within an example of a multimodal road transport.
