Shipping Chain Choices in Long Distance Supply Chains: Descriptive Analysis and a Decision Tree Model

摘要

Shipping chain configuration is among the key logistics choices that have been ignored or treated insufficiently in the current freight transportation models. This study focuses on the shipping chain configuration and modeling of its relevant logistics choices including number of stops and stop types. A brief descriptive analysis is performed on the results of an online establishment survey to explore different shipping chain configurations used by decision-makers (business establishments). Also, a system of hierarchical database models of shipping chain choice for freight transportation is presented. A system of decision tree models is proposed to determine the shipping chain configuration of freight transportation by identifying number of stops and type of stops per chain. The results of the survey are used for analysis and model estimation. The proposed decision tree models are developed using eighty percent of the observations in the data and the remaining twenty percent are used to validate the models. The results of model estimation indicated that shipments’ attributes are the most significant variables in predicting the configuration of shipping chain. The results of the validation showed that the estimated trees could predict the shipping chain configuration for the test data with an acceptable precision. This confirms that decision tree models are powerful tools that can be used to predict shipping chain configurations of freight flows.