Travel Distance Through Transportation Terminals on a Grid: Alternative Routing Strategies

This paper analyzes two strategies for routing shipments through transportation terminals. One strategy is to send each shipment through the terminal offering the minimum possible travel distance. The other strategy is to send each shipment through the terminal near the travel origin offering the minimum possible travel distance. Although the second strategy results in slightly larger average travel distance, more flow is consolidate onto transportation links. Flow consolidation is desirable because of economies to scale in transportation. The relation between average travel distance and number of terminals is quantified through use of continuous space models, and verified with an example involving the 37 largest cities in the United States. In addition, this paper identifies conditions under which the two routing strategies offer the same average travel distance, and concludes that the choice of terminal can generally be limited to those near the travel origin.