Abstract
Urban pickup and delivery (PUD) activities are important for logistics operations. Real operations for general freight involve a high degree of complexity due to daily variability. Discrete-event simulation (DES) is a method that can mimic real operations and include stochastic parameters. However, realistic vehicle routing is difficult to build in DES models. The objective is to create a DES model for realistic freight routing, which considers the driver’s routing decisions. Realistic models need to predict the delivery route (including time and distance) for variable consignment address and backhaul pickup. Geographic information systems (GIS) and DES were combined to develop freight PUD models. GIS was used to process geographical data. Two DES models were developed and compared. The first was a simple suburb model, and the second an intersection-based model. Real industrial data were applied including one-year consignment data and global positioning system (GPS) data. A case study of one delivery tour is shown, with results validated with actual GPS data. The DES results were also compared with conventional GIS models. The result shows the intersection-based model is adequate to mimic actual PUD routing. This work provides a method for combining GIS and DES to build freight operation models for urban PUD. This has the potential to help industry logistics practitioners better understand their current operations and experiment with different scenarios.
Highlights
This paper describes a method for combining Geographic information system (GIS)
The truck undertakes customer addresses are visited in one truck tour
This paper presents and evaluates a method to create urban pickup and delivery (PUD) models
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Freight transport is important for goods supply and the world economy. For New. Zealand, which is the case under examination, freight transport is a major section for economic growth [1]. There are still difficulties in developing freight models [2,3,4]
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