No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Thailand is the world's largest natural rubbers exporter. The major type of natural rubbers exported is block rubber. Currently, the transportation of natural rubbers in Thailand depends mainly on truck mode because of the convenience and extensive network of roads. However, Thailand confronts road transportation limitations including maximum acceptable weight, traffic congestion and high fuel prices. Dealing with these problems, the multimodal connection from roads to container yards (CY) and ports is expected to decrease logistics cost, and increase various opportunities to trade with neighbouring countries. This paper, thus, aims at examining key factors influencing the use of multimodal transportation utilizing the exploratory factor analysis (EFA). The principal components analysis (PCA) method, together with the eigenvalue over 1, factor loading of 0.40, and varimax rotation method, extracted five key factors with a total of 20 associated attributes, which are the Multimodal Operation, Service Operation, Multimodal Service Provider, Market Consideration, and Road Constraints factors. The result also pinpoints the capacity of container yard (CY) or port, accessibility to container yard (CY) or port, documentation process, logistics cost, adequacy of a multimode service provider, and law enforcement on truck driving hours, as crucial attributes in planning for multimodal transportation. This paper can be used as a guideline for a feasibility study of multimodal transportation of natural block rubber in Thailand.

Thailand is one of the world’s leading exporters of block rubbers, mainly used in the automobile industry. The country strives to produce a better quality of block rubber and deliver the products to the industry, at competitive prices, to maintain its competitiveness and move ahead with sustainable growth. The government promotes a multimodal transportation to reduce logistics costs and increase the transportation network efficiency. This study develops a system dynamics (SD) model of the multimodal transportation of block rubber transportation in Thailand, to examine the different mode combinations of block rubber transportation in the long term. The results confirm using multimodal transportation (i.e., truck-ship and truck-train modes) to minimize the final logistics cost of the block rubber transportation from the growing areas to the export point, in the long term. Multimodal transportation can save up to half the final logistics costs, compared to the truck-only mode. The truck-ship and truck-train mode combinations are preferred in the southern and northeastern regions, respectively, as they provide the lowest logistics costs, in the long term. With government supports in port expansion, double-track enlargement, and access roads to ports and railway stations, multimodal transportation is expected to reduce the final logistics cost by half each year. All of these raise the country’s competitiveness on a global scale and achieve a sustainable growth and development of block rubber products in the long term. The developed SD model provides a guideline for the multimode selection of block rubber and other agricultural products with bulk transportation, to achieve the lowest logistics cost and enhance the transport efficiency, in the long term.