A Model for Cost Assessment of Delivering Agricultural Products to the Departure Port

Abstract

This paper proposes and validates a compact, reproducible model for the operational cost assessment of road delivery of agricultural products to a departure port. The motivation is the high variability of export logistics under wartime disruptions and infrastructure constraints, where queues in the pre-port area create non-productive downtime and destabilize unloading schedules.

The approach combines decomposition of the delivery process into travel, loading and paperwork, and queue waiting, decomposition of total trip cost into movement, loading, queue-related idle time, and fixed administrative components, a full-factorial experiment 2³ with central-point replications for the controllable factors - average speed V, loading and paperwork time T_load, and queue waiting time T_queue, and linear regression meta-modeling for rapid scenario comparison. Empirical data from N=120 field observations were used to parameterize the baseline regime and to quantify the typical variability of speed and time components. For a representative route length of D=500 km, the unit delivery cost ranges from 1307 to 1519 UAH/t and the total delivery time ranges from 10.3 to 20.6 hours, depending primarily on the queue intensity and speed regime. A local one-at-a-time sensitivity analysis (+10% change) shows that queue waiting time is the dominant operational driver of unit cost: a 10% increase in T_queue raises unit cost by about 0.9%, while the same increase in T_load, raises it by about 0.4%; conversely, a 10% increase in V reduces unit cost by about 0.6%.

The resulting regression relationships do not replace network-level optimization or detailed simulation, but they provide an interpretable decision-support tool for fast screening of delivery scenarios, tuning of arrival time slots, and prioritization of interventions aimed at reducing port queues and standardizing loading operations. Further research should aim to detail queuing mechanisms, including a simulation model, and calibrate parameters based on an extended flight schedule for various ports and seasons.