Manual load placement and LDM - in practice
Manual load placement and LDM - in practice
Arranging cargo or pallets on the trailer is not a problem, even in memory or on a sheet of paper, if the pallets have standard dimensions. This is quite easy on a standard vehicle. It is easy to see how many pallets will fit into the truck. Difficulties begin when we have an unusual vehicle and an unusual load. In this case, we can devote many hours to determining the occupancy of space for, for example, 10 vehicles with unusual loads and the risk of error increases. In forwarding, however, such situations often occur, such as when planning the transport of air-conditioning units to order or similar devices and machines. They rarely have standardized dimensions.
The free loading planning program Smartload.pl comes to the rescue. Already in the free version, the user can define his own vehicle size and load dimensions.
Arranging as easy as a Tetris game
The program handles loads by road, and thanks to the use of the imperial unit system (inches, pounds), it is perfect for handling containers and other cargo spaces in sea transport.
The program works in 2 free modes:
Standard - here, the user only provides cargo data, and the system selects the vehicle itself
Advanced - you can add your vehicle and your loads with standard or non-standard dimensions and get the optimal placement.
The volume occupied on a vehicle or container is also calculated on an ongoing basis. In addition, we provide how many LDM (loading meters) are in use.
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LDM - is it really needed? What is it and how is it calculated.
The shipping and transport sector is a specialized environment, even using its own measurement units, which not everyone is aware of. The load capacity of the vehicle is not only tons and kilograms, but also LDM - loading meters. What is LDM and what does it mean?
LDM should not be confused with a linear meter (m) or a square meter (m2).
LDM is in fact the space of a semi-trailer with a length of one meter and the width of the semi-trailer. However, how to quickly check how much LDM a given product will take, especially when it is a product with non-standard dimensions?
1 LDM = 2.4 mx 1m = 2.4 m2
Usually it is taken as the width of the trailer 240 cm. Therefore, it is easy to deduce that the rectangle which is the freight meter is a "strip" of 240 x 100 cm. Popular curtains or tarpaulins, i.e. 90% of trucks that we meet on the roads, are 13.6 LDM vehicles.
It follows that the goods transported on them can take the space of 2.4 meters times 13.6 meters, which is 32.64 m2. So in this case, 13.6 LDM is less than 33 square meters (m2).
We can forget about the necessity to perform these calculations, as well as many others, when using smartload.pl - the program does all this for us and provides ready results. Once the goods have been placed, they can be corrected by moving the loads using the Drag and Drop function, i.e. by dragging them with the mouse to a different place in the vehicle or outside the vehicle.
Smartload.pl was created in the period 2016-2021 and is still being developed. The official start of the program is dated November 2021. The program uses many advanced, proprietary algorithms, in cooperation with scientists from the Gdańsk University of Technology, the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics. Many companies from Poland, Europe and around the world already use smartload.pl.