Proposal · Laem Chabang Truck Queue Redesign · Friday, 18 September 2026
One queue. Every terminal. No jam.
A single, demand-responsive truck appointment & gate orchestration platform for Laem Chabang Port — built to finish what the 2025 electronic‑queue mandate started.
01 — The problem
Every party below touches a truck's trip through the port — but no one of them can see, or smooth, the whole flow. That's the gap this proposal closes.
02 — Current state
GET /quota/{date} — 24 flat hourly slotsPOST /reserve — plate + containers + hour03 — Root-cause diagnosis
Every truck in an hour has every reason to arrive at :00 — there's no intra-hour smoothing tied to real yard/crane throughput.
"Next Phase" in the port's own diagram — zero cost to speculative bookings or no-shows today.
Each terminal runs its own quota; no cross-terminal sequencing and no port-wide view for PAT to rebalance.
SCM Net's largely manual Excel-based B/L chain pushes bookings to cluster right before vessel cutoff.
Trucks queue on the public road, not at an off-site buffer — so even right-sized demand still shows up as a physical jam.
No "leave now" signal, so trucks arrive early and idle at the gate rather than en route on a timed approach.
The documented API is export-only; import trucks share the same gates without necessarily going through any slot-based system at all.
An export truck drops its container and drives home empty, while a second truck drives in empty to collect an import going the same way. No one can see both jobs, so the road carries two trips where one would do.
04 — The solution
Every terminal keeps its own operations. LCB ONE sits as the shared booking, pricing, and visibility layer across all of them, using the same API pattern B4 (TIPS) already exposes as the integration contract — extended to cover import as well as export from day one.
10–15 min windows, capacity computed from live yard/gate/crane signals, not a flat number.
Activates the QR/PromptPay step already diagrammed; no-shows throttle a company's future booking priority.
Live cross-terminal utilization, queue length, and congestion forecast — with rebalancing levers.
Provisional booking the moment SI/VGM are ready, instead of waiting for the full document chain.
App/LINE "leave now" and buffer-yard holding, keeping trucks off the public road until called.
LCB ONE's own reservation contract, not borrowed from any one terminal. A thin adapter maps to systems like B4 (TIPS); terminals with none adopt LCB ONE directly.
Trucking companies offer trucks that will be empty after an export drop; any LSP books one for an import pickup going the same way — one trip instead of two.
05 — Architecture
Own canonical reservation API (§6 of the proposal doc), event-driven behind LCB ONE's own OAuth2 gateway; Redis-backed slot locking to prevent overbooking under burst load; message queue for reservation/gate events; a direct e-Customs/NSW feed for import eligibility; LINE OA as the pragmatic driver-notification channel.
06 — Dynamic slot engine
Illustrative: today's model allows every truck booked in an hour to target :00, producing a spike each hour. The dynamic engine holds the same total throughput but allocates it across 15‑minute windows sized to real yard/gate capacity — flattening arrivals without reducing volume.
06b — Return-load market
Smoothing arrivals spreads the trucks out. Matching return loads takes trucks off the road altogether — the trip that removes congestion is the one that never happens.
Trucks leaving LCB empty (planning estimate)
Fewer truck trips a day on the port roads, at about 1,430 matches a day (estimate)
Cheaper for the LSP than a dedicated trip — and paid income for a trip the trucker was making anyway
Estimates are illustrative, based on ~8,400 truck visits a day; no baseline data on empty trips exists yet. Measuring the real empty-out share is part of the pilot (see The ask). Any trucking company can offer, any LSP can book; the trucker sets the price and the platform shows the saving.
07 — Value by stakeholder
08 — Roadmap
One booking surface calling the existing export API as-is, plus a new mirrored import endpoint built alongside it since none exists today. Fastest path to a working demo, covering both directions from day one.
15‑minute capacity-aware windows; activate the QR/PromptPay step already diagrammed as "Next Phase," tied to the reliability score. Once import and export bookings share one platform and payment is live, open the return-load market: empty trucks offered after an export drop, matched to import pickups.
PAT-facing cross-terminal dashboard; early provisional booking as soon as SI/VGM are ready in SCM Net.
GPS-based "leave now" notifications and buffer-yard holding — the piece that needs physical/ops coordination alongside the software.
The ask
A single-terminal Phase 1 pilot validates the model against real gate data before asking any stakeholder group to commit port-wide.
Pick one terminal + one gate for a 4–6 week Phase 1 pilot on top of its existing API.
Measure gate wait time and arrival clustering, before vs. after dynamic slotting — and the share of trucks leaving empty, the baseline for the return-load market.
Use pilot data to bring associations and remaining terminals into the shared platform.