![[yellow01.jpg]](-header/yellow01.jpg)
Line Haul Scheduling for Yellow Transportation
ORTEC was selected by Yellow Transportation in March 2001 to produce a tailored optimization solution for its Line haul Scheduling Operation. In this project, ORTEC collaborates with its strategic partner Axioma to provide a complete solution that capitalizes on Yellow Transportation’s existing scheduling system.
Yellow Transportation is the largest less-than-truckload (LTL)-carrier in the United States, providing comprehensive transportation solutions for shippers throughout North America, Europe and the Asian/Pacific area. Transport over the nationwide line haul network currently requires 40,000 trailers with 5,400 drivers, 3,200 tractors and 5 railroads.
With as many as 250,000 shipments flowing through the line haul scheduling network at any given time, sustaining Yellow Transportation’s high reliability while keeping transportation costs down is a daunting challenge. With increased service differentiation and the highly fluctuating demand for transportation in today’s economy, the need for more sophisticated planning technology was apparent.
The new solution enables Yellow to create efficient, high quality line haul schedules (driver tours) for a specific region in a short period of time with fewer empty miles and congestion delays, based on customer demand forecasts. These schedules are used as the framework for operational planning over the 25 different US regions. Centralized intra-regional implementation of the final solution is anticipated as the next step to take.
The final product has been designed using various SHORTREC software components for data management, planning board display, digitized road map information and an advanced optimization engine (using XPRESS as mathematical solver). The use of these components significantly reduces development efforts and ensures a reliable, complete and very flexible solution for Yellow.