PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

New dispatch system could save money for trucking industry, make life easier for drivers

2013-06-27
(Press-News.org) CORVALLIS, Ore. – Engineers at Oregon State University are studying a new approach to organize and route truck transportation that could save millions of dollars, improve the quality of life for thousands of truck drivers and make freight transportation far more efficient.

The findings, published recently in Transportation Research Part E, show the feasibility of the new system. More research is still needed before implementation, but there's potential to revolutionize the way that truck transportation is handled in the United States and around the world, some experts say.

Loads could be delivered more rapidly, costs could be lowered, and the exhausting experience of some truck drivers who often spend two to three weeks on the road between visits back home might be greatly reduced. This difficult lifestyle often leads them to quit their job as a result.

That turnover problem is sufficiently severe that more long-haul, full-truckload drivers quit every year than there are trucks of that type on the road.

"The perceived quality of life for long-haul truck drivers is poor, and it shouldn't have to be that way," said Hector Vergara, an assistant professor in the OSU School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, who is working on this project in collaboration with researchers at the University of Arkansas.

"It will take a transition for companies to see how the approach we are studying can work effectively, but it should help address several of the problems they face," he said.

In truck transportation, some of the existing approaches include "point to point," in which one driver stays with a full load all the way to its often-distant destination; "hub and spoke" systems in which less-than-full loads are changed at selected points; and "relay" networks in which the drivers change but the load stays on the truck.

None of these systems by themselves are ideal for long-haul transport. The hub and spoke system is among the most popular with drivers because they get home much more frequently, but it can be costly and inefficient for full-truckload transportation. Relay networks make sense in theory but are difficult to implement.

The new approach under study combines the relay system and the point-to-point system for full-truckload transport. The researchers at OSU developed a new mathematical approach to optimize the design of the dispatching system for the movement of goods and to minimize the impact on drivers. It's one of the first models of its type to create a mixed-fleet dispatching system at a large scale.

"We now know this approach can work," Vergara said. "Compared to point-to-point, this system should cut the length of trips a driver makes by about two-thirds, and get drivers back to their homes much more often. We can also keep loads moving while drivers rest, and because of that save significant amounts of money on the number of trucks needed to move a given amount of freight."

The computer optimization determines the best way to dispatch loads and tells where to locate relay points, and how different loads should be routed through the relay network.

Truck transportation systems will never be perfect, researchers concede, because there are so many variables that can cause unpredictable problems – weather delays, road closures, traffic jams, truck breakdowns, driver illnesses. But the current system, especially for long-haul, point-to-point transport, is already riddled with problems, and significant improvements based on computer optimization should be possible.

Disillusionment with existing approaches led to a shortage of 125,000 truck drivers in 2011, the researchers noted in the study. The negative economic impacts of this system also reach beyond just the trucking industry, they said.

### Editor's Note: The study this story is based on is available online: http://hdl.handle.net/1957/38433.


ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

UCSB research points to a potential therapeutic approach to Alzheimer's disease

2013-06-27
(Santa Barbara, California) –– Building on research published eight years ago in the journal Chemistry and Biology, Kenneth S. Kosik, Harriman Professor in Neuroscience and co-director of the Neuroscience Research Institute (NRI) at UC Santa Barbara, and his team have now applied their findings to two distinct, well-known mouse models, demonstrating a new potential target in the fight against Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases. The results were published online June 4 as the Paper of the Week in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. As a Paper of the Week, ...

Rutgers-Camden professor examines social capabilities of performing multiple-action sequences

2013-06-27
The day of the big barbecue arrives and it's time to fire up the grill. But rather than toss the hamburgers and hotdogs haphazardly onto the grate, you wait for the heat to reach an optimal temperature, and then neatly lay them out in their apportioned areas according to size and cooking times. Meanwhile, your friend is preparing the beverages. Cups are grabbed face down from the stack, turned over, and – using the other hand – filled with ice. While these tasks – like countless, everyday actions – may seem trivial at first glance, they are actually fairly complex, according ...

People prefer 'carrots' to 'sticks' when it comes to healthcare incentives

2013-06-27
To keep costs low, companies often incentivize healthy lifestyles. Now, new research suggests that how these incentives are framed — as benefits for healthy-weight people or penalties for overweight people — makes a big difference. The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that policies that carry higher premiums for overweight individuals are perceived as punishing and stigmatizing. Researcher David Tannenbaum of the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles wanted ...

DNA found outside genes plays largely unknown, potentially vital roles

2013-06-27
A new UC San Francisco study highlights the potential importance of the vast majority of human DNA that lies outside of genes within the cell. The researchers found that about 85 percent of these stretches of DNA make RNA, a molecule that increasingly is being found to play important roles within cells. They also determined that this RNA-making DNA is more likely than other non-gene DNA regions to be associated with inherited disease risks. The study, published in the free online journal PLOS Genetics on June 20, 2013, is one of the most extensive examinations of the ...

Yukon gold mine yields ancient horse fossil

2013-06-27
When University of Alberta researcher Duane Froese found an unusually large horse fossil in the Yukon permafrost, he knew it was important. Now, in a new study published online today in Nature, this fossil is rewriting the story of equine evolution as the ancient horse has its genome sequenced. Unlike the small ice age horse fossils that are common across the unglaciated areas of the Yukon, Alaska and Siberia that date to the last 100,000 years, this fossil was at least the size of a modern domestic horse. Froese, an associate professor in the U of A Department of Earth ...

A stepping-stone for oxygen on Earth

2013-06-27
For most terrestrial life on Earth, oxygen is necessary for survival. But the planet's atmosphere did not always contain this life-sustaining substance, and one of science's greatest mysteries is how and when oxygenic photosynthesis—the process responsible for producing oxygen on Earth through the splitting of water molecules—first began. Now, a team led by geobiologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has found evidence of a precursor photosystem involving manganese that predates cyanobacteria, the first group of organisms to release oxygen into the ...

Solar power heads in a new direction: Thinner

2013-06-27
CAMBRIDGE, Mass- Most efforts at improving solar cells have focused on increasing the efficiency of their energy conversion, or on lowering the cost of manufacturing. But now MIT researchers are opening another avenue for improvement, aiming to produce the thinnest and most lightweight solar panels possible. Such panels, which have the potential to surpass any substance other than reactor-grade uranium in terms of energy produced per pound of material, could be made from stacked sheets of one-molecule-thick materials such as graphene or molybdenum disulfide. Jeffrey ...

Comparing genomes of wild and domestic tomato

2013-06-27
You say tomato, I say comparative transcriptomics. Researchers in the U.S., Europe and Japan have produced the first comparison of both the DNA sequences and which genes are active, or being transcribed, between the domestic tomato and its wild cousins. The results give insight into the genetic changes involved in domestication and may help with future efforts to breed new traits into tomato or other crops, said Julin Maloof, professor of plant biology in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Maloof is senior author on the study, published ...

First transiting planets in a star cluster discovered

2013-06-27
All stars begin their lives in groups. Most stars, including our Sun, are born in small, benign groups that quickly fall apart. Others form in huge, dense swarms that survive for billions of years as stellar clusters. Within such rich and dense clusters, stars jostle for room with thousands of neighbors while strong radiation and harsh stellar winds scour interstellar space, stripping planet-forming materials from nearby stars. It would thus seem an unlikely place to find alien worlds. Yet 3,000 light-years from Earth, in the star cluster NGC 6811, astronomers have found ...

Antibiotics: Change route of delivery to mitigate resistance

2013-06-27
New research suggests that the rapid rise of antibiotic resistance correlates with oral ingestion of antibiotics, raising the possibility that other routes of administration could reduce the spread of resistance. The manuscript appears online ahead of print in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. "For more than 40 years, a few doses of penicillin were enough to take care of deadly bacterial infections," says Hua Wang of the Ohio State University, Columbus, a researcher on the study. But since the 1980s, antibiotic resistance has been spreading rapidly, ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

So what should we call this – a grue jay?

Chicago Quantum Exchange-led coalition advances to final round in NSF Engine competition

Study identifies candidates for therapeutic targets in pediatric germ cell tumors

Media alert: The global burden of CVD

Study illuminates contributing factors to blood vessel leakage

What nations around the world can learn from Ukraine

Mixing tree species does not always make forests more drought-resilient

Public confidence in U.S. health agencies slides, fueled by declines among Democrats

“Quantum squeezing” a nanoscale particle for the first time

El Niño spurs extreme daily rain events despite drier monsoons in India

Two studies explore the genomic diversity of deadly mosquito vectors

Zebra finches categorize their vocal calls by meaning

Analysis challenges conventional wisdom about partisan support for US science funding

New model can accurately predict a forest’s future

‘Like talking on the telephone’: Quantum computing engineers get atoms chatting long distance

Genomic evolution of major malaria-transmitting mosquito species uncovered

Overcoming the barriers of hydrogen storage with a low-temperature hydrogen battery

Tuberculosis vulnerability of people with HIV: a viral protein implicated

Partnership with Kenya's Turkana community helps scientists discover genes involved in adaptation to desert living

Decoding the selfish gene, from evolutionary cheaters to disease control

Major review highlights latest evidence on real-time test for blood – clotting in childbirth emergencies

Inspired by bacteria’s defense strategies

Research spotlight: Combination therapy shows promise for overcoming treatment resistance in glioblastoma

University of Houston co-leads $25 million NIH-funded grant to study the delay of nearsightedness in children

NRG Oncology PREDICT-RT study completes patient accrual, tests individualized concurrent therapy and radiation for high-risk prostate cancer

Taking aim at nearsightedness in kids before it’s diagnosed

With no prior training, dogs can infer how similar types of toys work, even when they don’t look alike

Three deadliest risk factors of a common liver disease identified in new study

Dogs can extend word meanings to new objects based on function, not appearance

Palaeontology: South American amber deposit ‘abuzz’ with ancient insects

[Press-News.org] New dispatch system could save money for trucking industry, make life easier for drivers