Information quality in freight transportation operations– findings from the trucking sector and potential implications for the maritime sector

We study the impact information timeliness in two different freight transportation network contexts.  In the in-land truckload transportation context, the central question addressed is: if transportation service providers get more timely information about clients’ shipment requirements, by how much will network performance improve?  Through methodologies comprising mixed integer programming and computational experiments on realistic data, we find improvements that are significant in both statistical and practical terms.  For the second context -the interface between maritime and terrestrial transportation- preliminary insights are presented.  The insights, which signal the potential value of information timeliness in that context, draw on a combination of small-scale computer simulations and archival research on current discourse among stakeholders in the maritime transportation sector.