Functional Design of Physical Internet Facilities: A Road-based Crossdocking Hub

As part of the 2010 IMHRC, Montreuil, Meller and Ballot proposed a set of facility types that would be necessary to operate a Physical Internet (PI, π), which they termed π-nodes. This paper is part of a three-paper series for the 2012 IMHRC where the authors provide functional designs of three PI facilities. This paper covers a unimodal road-based crossdocking hub designed specifically to exploit the characteristics of Physical Internet modular containers so as to enable the efficient and sustainable transhipment of each of them from its inbound truck to its outbound truck. The objective of the paper is to provide a design that is feasible to meet the objectives of this type of facility, identify ways to measure the performance of the design, and to identify research models that would assist in the design of such facilities. The functional design is presented in sufficient detail as to provide an engineer a proof of concept.

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