Urban logistics transportation system combining passenger and freight flows: a heuristic approach

Abstract

This research addresses the dynamic operational planning of an urban logistics system where an existing bus network is integrated with the urban freight delivery process, and with a last mile delivery service, to send freight to city centres. The operational planning involves the assignment of each freight request to a bus hub, where requests are dropped by clients, to a bus service starting at the assigned hub, and to a bus stop to be offloaded by the last mile operator (LMO). A heuristic algorithm focusing on the last mile delivery phase is proposed aiming, first, to minimize the number of bus offloads (i.e., the number of times the LMO needs to go to bus stops) and then, to minimize the average last mile delivery time of the LMO. The computational tests over a real bus network dataset in the city of Porto, Portugal, defined in SOLFI project, show the merits of the proposed algorithm.