Truck travel time reliability and prediction in a port drayage network

Port drayage is an important component of the marine intermodal system and affects the efficiency of the intermodal supply chain. Sharing and utilizing drayage truck arrival information could improve both port drayage and port operational efficiency. To assess the feasibility of truck arrival time predictions, this research explores how reliable the port drayage network is. First, two reliability measures are used to evaluate how the travel time reliability changes with trip origins and across drayage networks. Then, the truck routing choices between Origin-Destination (OD) pairs are examined. Last, a simple method is proposed to predict the 95 per cent confidence interval of travel time between any OD pair and is validated with GPS data. The research results demonstrate that the proposed travel time prediction method is sufficient for predicting truck arrival time windows at the terminal and can be translated into truck arrival group information. It is therefore sufficient to support the implementation of a previously proposed container-handling strategy and to improve the efficiency of the drayage truck/container terminal interface.