Abstract
Transportation of goods by trucks plays an important role in the physical distribution system of most business enterprises. The selection and planning of the most suitable kind of trucks for a given commodity, business activity and route is one of the essential elements in order to reduce the transportation cost. Present paper considers a method of evaluating economy of employing trucks from a macroscopic point of view. The study of establishing an approximation formula for estimating the driving distance relative to the size of trucks was presented in the previous reports by the authors. With the application of the above results, a method of evaluating the total freight costs was first established. Then, the profitability of trucks by the type of road, viz. simplified network and the real world network, was examined and relative advantages between them under various combination of values of factors being considered were investigated. In order to check the validity of the method, an example was taken from a soft-drink manufacture. The result, which was given in a graphical presentation indicated how the economical regions for each type of truck changed under various road conditions.
