Shamrock-Hub A New Container based Transportation System (E-Business will create new components in infrastructure)

摘要

The transport industry plays an increasingly important role in the efficiency and costs within the value adding chain of the e-business guided production. The functions in the material flow from supplier of raw materials to the end users of the product in global business makes up 10% to 30% - and sometimes more - of the total cost of a product. Price and time competition among forwarders is getting tougher and that is why it is important to find ways of lowering the transportation costs in logistic systems and of increasing the flexibility of special services to improve quality for the customer, i.e. smaller loads and more frequent deliveries, better price, less damage of goods, lower transport time from door to door, etc. Road traffic in general actually is at the moment more important for industrial use in our market situation than air, railway or inland ship transport. One way to reduce costs is to change from systems with independent traffic lines and terminals to a logistic network using an extended infrastructure, e.g. public distribution centers (DC) and container terminals (CT) and (DC+CT), for a highway network with optimal clustering function, by collecting and consolidating all goods in an optimal location i.e. in/above a highway crossing, which gives the possibility to send all material on the shortest way, to the cheapest price, to the minimum of transportation time, after schedule etc. - At the same time this (DC+CT) should also be connected with other similar networks too, like railway-, airway- or waterway-networks. The whole innovative System coming out is discussed as the "Shamrock-Hub-Project" in this paper. My reference model is the European Highway network, including the German Autobahn network, especially one knot: the motorway junction connecting Autobahn A6/A81, a real hot spot object with some problems near the city of Weinsberg, which has an average flow of about 180.000 vehicles per day, including 26% of trucks; we collected all data for our discussion and simulation model there.