U. S. Postal Service, Headquarters Purchasing, 475 L'Enfant Plaza West SW, Room 4541, Washington, DC 20260-6238

70 -- TRUCK TERMINAL OPERATIONS CONTROL AND OPTIMIZATION SOFTWARE POC Arlene Walker-Hall, Purchasing Specialist, (202) 268-4762. The United States Postal Service is seeking information in the form of a Request for Information (RFI) from vendors on commercial off the shelf products that will provide truck terminal operations control and optimization. The application is intended to control the movement and placement of vans in a shipping terminal amongst pads, inbound doors, outbound doors, and to trucks. As much of the operation should be automated as possible, i.e. rules to select appropriate doors for vans based on door material handling capability versus van load types and percentages, scheduled movement, priority, rehandling considerations. Ideally the product will have a flexible configurable capability for optimizing operations to reduce turnaround and cycle times to allow the same transport and labor resources to handle a constantly growing workload. The product must have either integrated radio frequency data collection (RD/DC) capability or the capability to integrate RF/DC into it. The COTS product being sought shoudl have the following general functions: inbound gate management; inbound queue management; inbound dock management; schedule management; dispatching; outbound gate management; outbound queue management; outbound dock management; robust and automatic fault recovery; open system based architecture. Operations control must be near real-time. RF data communication will be used to send commands to dock clerks and tractor-trailer operators. Video displays at the dispatcher and docks will display van and door status, late schedules, and loading information. The product must have a capability to schedule events and signal alarms based on specific times or logical events. The product must also be able to receive and send data transparently to external systems based on SQL compliant database management systems. This RFI is not a solicition, however, vendors that respond will be informed in the event a solicitation is issued. The response to this RFI should describe the available product, the degree of customization required to meet the general requirements, provide three references and number of locations where the product is installed, the technical architecture of the product, and a description of the company, including years in business and size. Send all responses to Arlene Walker-Hall at the above address. Responses should be received at this office by April 1, 1995. (0061)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0419 19950303\70-0033.SOL)