Abstract
New York City’s food distribution system is among the largest in the United States. Food is transported by trucks from twelve major distribution centers to the city’s point-of-sale locations. Trucks consume large amounts of energy and contribute to large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, there is interest to increase the efficiency of New York City’s food distribution system. The Gowanus district in New York City is undergoing rezoning from an industrial zone to a mix residential and industrial zone. It serves as a living lab to test new initiatives, policies, and new infrastructure for electric vehicles. We analyze the impact of electrification of food-distribution trucks on greenhouse gas emissions and electricity demand in this paper. However, such analysis faces the challenges of accessing available and granular data, modeling of demands and deliveries that incorporate logistics and inventory management of different types of food retail stores, delivery route selection, and delivery schedule to optimize food distribution. We propose a framework to estimate truck routes for food delivery at a district level. We model the schedule of food delivery from a distribution center to retail stores as a vehicle routing problem using an optimization solver. Our case study shows that diesel trucks consume 300% more energy than electric trucks and generate 40% more greenhouse gases than diesel trucks for food distribution in the Gowanus district.
Highlights
New York City’s food distribution system is among the largest in the United States
For the trips made by the trucks every day to deliver food from the distribution center to the stores, diesel trucks consume 300% more energy and emit 40% more greenhouse gases than electric trucks
The current efficiency of the electric truck is 0.357 km/Mega Joules (MJ) and when the efficiency increases with the advancement in electric vehicle and battery technology, the energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduce significantly
Summary
New York City’s food distribution system is among the largest in the United States. Trucks are the major means of food transportation in New York City (NYC) NYC (2016). They are large consumers of energy and generators of greenhouse gases (Salvatore et al, 2017). In the United States, the transportation sector contributes to 28% of the total energy consumed each year NASEM (2021), 58% of which is from light trucks, cars, and motorcycles, 23% is from other trucks, Energy and Emissions in Food Distribution and the remaining 19% is from aircrafts, boats, ships, trains, buses, and pipelines. There is interest in understanding the impact of electrification of the food distribution system in the city
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