Abstract
Today, there is a great need for greener urban freight transportations due to their ever-increasing environmental impact. The planet’s climate has been significantly affected as the temperature is constantly rising and extreme weather events are occurring more and more often. Aiming to reduce the environmental impact of freight transportation in urban areas, an advanced vehicle routing and scheduling system for improving urban freight transportations, has been developed. This paper presents the functionality of the advanced system, while also analyzing its subsystems and demonstrating its use in a case study. The system is provided as an integrated cloud-based software to support the needs of logistics companies, in order to efficiently schedule their deliveries and perform the routing of their vehicles. The utilized multi-objective algorithm produces solutions that minimize either the distribution cost or the environmental emissions or a combination of these parameters. An application of the system is performed for validation purposes, concerning the comparison of the system’s results with corresponding real-life data provided by a medium-sized logistics company. The results of the testing reveal its significant contribution to the reduction of the environmental impact of the company’s distribution services.
Highlights
The change of people’s way of life over time has resulted, in a relatively short period of time, in the great increase of the population of the cities
In the remainder of the paper, we present our solution for achieving reduced environmental emissions in urban freight transportations
We focused on minimizing CO2 emissions as they are the principal greenhouse gas that is emitted from motor vehicles
Summary
The change of people’s way of life over time has resulted, in a relatively short period of time, in the great increase of the population of the cities. This, has dramatically increased the need to distribute goods in and out of urban areas. The large number of these trucks circulating in urban areas has exacerbated the already heavy traffic load due to private vehicles and public transport that serve the transportation of citizens [1]. The population in cities is demanding and consuming an ever-growing volume of goods. This has resulted in an increasing need for goods to move in and out of cities in a sustainable and efficient way, especially in large cities and, according to many research studies, this is going to be one of the main challenges faced by humanity in the near future [3,4]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
