Temporal stability of shipment size decisions related to choice of truck type

Abstract

The choice of shipment size is a vital decision in logistics and has a strong indirect influence on freight transport demand, via the choice of mode and truck type choice. Through time, shipment sizes can change as a result of new decisions in the logistics process or due to conditions external to the supply chain. This study investigates the temporal stability of shipment size choices, relating these to the choice of truck types. It uses repeated cross-sectional data for the years 2015, 2017, and 2019 collected from cordon and business establishment surveys in Addis Ababa city, Ethiopia. The integrated choice and latent variables (ICLV) and latent growth (LG) models were used to assess the time-dependent patterns of choosing shipment sizes, both at the level of the entire freight system as well as the specific truck types. The model results reveal that shipment size decisions are temporally unstable where, in our case, shipment sizes exhibited a declining trend.

KEYWORDS:

• Shipment size
• freight mode choice
• time dependent
• temporal stability
• discrete–continuous models

Acknowledgements

Also thankful for the support from Volvo Research and Educational Foundation (VREF) for financing the first author’s study visit to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which led to the formulation of this research paper. The authors appreciate the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that help us to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authorship Contribution

Abel Kebede Reda: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft. Jose Holguin-Veras: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Formal analysis. Lori Tavassy: Methodology, Writing – review & editing. Girma Gebresenbet: Methodology, Writing – review & editing, Project administration. David Ljungberg: Methodology, Writing – review & editing.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge the support and funding for this research by EP-NUFFIC, the Dutch Organization for Internationalization of Education, through the CBP-Ethiolog project (NICHE-ETH-285).