Abstract
One of the significant side-effects of growing urbanization is the constantly increasing amount of freight transportation in cities. This is mainly performed by conventional vans and trucks and causes a variety of problems such as road congestion, noise nuisance and pollution. Yet delivering goods to residents is a necessity. Sustainable concepts of city distribution networks are one way of mitigating difficulties of freight services. In this paper we develop a two-echelon city distribution scheme with temporal and spatial synchronization between cargo bikes and vans. The resulting heuristic is based on a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure with path relinking. In our computational experiments we use artificial data as well as real-world data of the city of Vienna. Furthermore we compare three distribution policies. The results show the costs caused by temporal synchronization and can give companies decision-support in planning a sustainable city distribution concept.
Highlights
The World Health Organization states in its Annual Report 2013 that two of the major challenges in the upcoming years are the aging of the population and growing urbanization, given that 70 % of the world population is forecast to live in cities by 2050 (World Health Organization—Centre for Health Development 2013)
For our city distribution problem with spatial and temporal synchronization between vehicles from and delivery tours to customers on both echelons, we propose a solution procedure which basically consists of greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) with path relinking (PR)
– GRASP alone, – GRASP+PR(I), where the PR step is used as integrated step, and – GRASP+PR(I+P), where the PR step is used as a post-optimization phase
Summary
The World Health Organization states in its Annual Report 2013 that two of the major challenges in the upcoming years are the aging of the population and growing urbanization, given that 70 % of the world population is forecast to live in cities by 2050 (World Health Organization—Centre for Health Development 2013). One important aspect of urbanization is the increasing traffic volume in cities, and with it the potential rise in traffic congestion, pollution and noise nuisance. A means of reducing inefficient polluting traffic within cities is to switch from conventional vehicles to other transport modes when entering urban zones. This requires coordination between different stakeholders in order to achieve an optimal and sustainable utilization of resources. Any re-organization of city logistics must be managed in such a way that traffic is reduced and the modal split shifts towards environmentally friendly transportation modes
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