A simulation-based approach to assess impacts of urban logistics policies on traffic flow dynamics
Abstract
In urban environments, there are now many challenging problems concerning freight transport.
As cities around the world grow rapidly, there is an increase in pickup-delivery truck traffic in
urban areas. It turns out that commercial traffic is now a major source of externalities in metro
areas, including congestion, noise, air pollution (small particulates, NOx, greenhouse gas
emissions), and traffic incidents [1].
To overcome these issues, many interesting and innovative strategies have been developed in
Europe and other parts of the world. Especially, some researchers proposed the idea of city
logistics to solve these difficult problems [2-3]. The idea of this concept is to rationalize the
freight activities in cities by optimizing operations considering the traffic conditions and the
congestion issues. Consequently, public authorities strongly need decision support frameworks
to evaluate urban logistics planning and management.
It turns out that a key point in predicting the impacts of city logistics is the influence of freight
on traffic flow dynamics. Particularly, pickup-delivery trucks maneuvers generate road
capacity reduction and lead to delay for individual drivers. Although this is a crucial topic, the
literature rarely addresses this issue. This paper aims to fill this lack of understanding by
incorporating the effects of urban freight in a traffic flow model.