E-trikes for urban delivery: An empirical mixed-fleet simulation approach to assess city logistics sustainability

Abstract

Increasing urbanization has resulted in changes in land use, environment, demographics, and consumer behavior. These changes have magnified the challenges of city logistics. In particular, last-mile delivery freight has become a growing challenge for sustainable cities. Despite numerous studies on last-mile delivery solutions, little attention has been given to assessing the performance of e-cargo in mixed fleet systems. This study's contribution lies in its empirical monitoring and evaluation of e-trike performance for two months and parameterization of a citywide simulation. We demonstrated how GPS data coupled with publicly available data can be used to develop various performance indicators and provided comparison between real-world data and the Google Distance Matrix API. Furthermore, we estimated the costs if the company used vans (all or a mixed fleet) for the same e-trike deliveries. The costs associated with an e-trike-based delivery system are not dramatically higher than those associated with traditional methods. Labor costs were found to be the primary factor influencing cost trade-offs. However, emissions costs are reduced to a large extent supporting sustainability initiatives of the system. This proposed approach can be generalized to evaluate alternative vehicle types that simultaneously change vehicle form factor and performance and fuel types.