Daniel,

You may find this recent report from my colleagues helpful. It focuses on urban freight demand management strategies and includes American case studies.

http://www.ssti.us/2013/10/new-report-from-ssti-discusses-freight-transportation-demand-management-strategies/

You can give a look to the CityGoods methodology in the paper by miself and Vigo:

https://3907fa3c-a-2a1be95a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/sistemaits.com/guidogentile/pubblicazioni/47%20Movement%20generation%20and%20trip%20distribution%20for%20freight%20demand%20modelling%20applied%20to%20city%20logistics%20%28ET2013%29.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7cq4Dn1YWyQoRv3sgGT-0QfNL2OJSO021Jhxz_6vQHXlQ-3d9g2zcMiXZUP1klV_SFvfYZtwBZ4q4LfAgE-rgOfxoV_sJKkfQ8UBcC1s8o5ftReW6xknya_MuzGkhDteQWmO8dt7YIzjQ7YY08JYXa-D2nXoO_V732bk_KVzNYG6KvY-3DaeH6q3H6vqHQL8SORkQVY5kGe6VfIdrVJGQC_rweMs8RTqucgr_b0PLVgH3veg11d_q2hYcUfVXnFwMgFx5zytDp9nzoxNScxLxlbKGDe5QY8ly1vm8OZqyBmgNJhNJPuZL_Jbjyek8SajCZHIQuopFlmmkjTjASSrwUmS2dnBxKnO9LUmOtHFl5KUei6WczJb2ZtNhoTXdeUDD_DfDeg0&attredirects=0

Daniel,

We work with multimodal terminals and freight operators to benchmark a number of aspects of freight management, particularly with the application of intelligent transportation systems. These include intelligent safety, location, incident and information management as well as demand-supply real-time market clearance. Which of these is most relevant to your work?

Daniel

your question is quite difficult and revealing at the same time. Let me start form the second aspect. The fact that you, correctly, underline that often the planning process is performed in an ad hoc way suggests that there is a lot of work to be done to conceptualize and formally structure the process. In fact I believe that whenever we think about planning we should be very careful in defining the desired end effects we are pursuing so to be able to evaluate the results of the planning we are providing. in other words unless we have a clear objective function in term of characteristics, performance, functions etc. that the city we are planning for should have or we will not be able to answer your clear question.

It is also difficult to answer your question since in many cases the info needed to start an appropriate planning "process" are laking and difficult to obtain since they also represent the competitive hedge companies have on their competitors.

Especially when we are dealing with long term planning we should be able to consider what has seldom been considered, that is secondary effects. In other words, when planning has to be evaluated one has to be endowed with a behavioral model in order to predict the most likely changes the innovation (regulatory, policy, infrastructural, etc) will provoke. in this cases most of the time only one single change (choice or stated choice) is considered. however this might be truly misleading since as activity based modeling for passengers tell us changes usually induce more than one adaptive behavior.

I do not know if I have answered your question but to summarize my position I would say:

1. seine clearly which is the city you want to have

2. define clearly which are the characteristics the freight distribution system should have

3. adopt sufficiently sophisticated methodologies that would be capable of letting you appreciate the short,medium long term type of adaptive strategies agents would most likely take

best regards

edoardo

Edoardo,

Your answer underlined main issues which are related to this question. Urban freight is not concerned much in Poland, neither as a policy measure or reseach activity. So there is lack of detailed knowledge about cites's freight profile form the logistics point of view, not only standard traffic counts. We (Gdansk University of Technology) are involved in Civitas Dynamo project, where three later traffic model for Gdynia is being developed. This may be a good starting point for possible future in-depth studies for urban freight.

best regards,

Daniel

Chris,

Thank you for this report. It's very practical, especially the case studies are highly descriptive.

best regards,

Daniel

Guido,

I have shared your article with my collegue, who is very into traffic modelling. It would be an interesting opportunity to look at such good example.

best regards,

Daniel

Yorgos,

Scope of your work is very comprehensive. For this question (and other issues, as well) location and incident manegement issues looks the most interesting.

best regards,

Daniel

Benjamin,

Authors did a really good job within this project. If you are interested in Urban Consolidation Centers, this may be usefull:

Urban Freight Consolidation Centres Final Report for Department of Transport, 2005

Prof. Michael Browne, Michael Sweet, Dr. Allan Woodburn and Julian Allen

We only focus on the container shipping. The widely-used method is optimization. As there is no need to consider traffic assignment problem, the freight planning is typically formulated by the mixed-integer linear/non-linear model. The non-linearity can be dealt with by many techniques, such as piecewise approximation. As a result, the model can be solved as Mixed-integer linear program. There are lots of commercial solvers for such model (e.g., CPLEX). Hope this helps.

Daniel,

For incident management, we use a combination of GPS on the vehicle and RFID on the cargo that is transported by the vehicle. If you are using these as components of your system, perhaps you could indicate how useful they are for you.

New GPS installation on trucks have increased capabilities, and there is a lot we can learn from the information they collect on the movement of the truck. Such information can be particularly useful in real time. Please let me know your view on this.

The popular method is mathematical optimization. Where non-linear model I proposal the metaheuristic method, evolutionary algorthms (eg. evolver - universal tool for Excel).

A different approach: heuristic contruction several variants, family of critorions and application of the multicriteria decision making methods.

Our principal concern is estimation and prediction. To get better results, we use filtering and we rely on real-time measurements.

Most of our problems require management reaction in real time. Timely detection of unwanted conditions is critical so that management can respond fast.

This topic boils down to customer expectations, distribution network capability and capacity and infrastructure planing. Why did UPS & FedEx have success a difficult time last winter? Back to the fundamentals I say.

Platform for Change sets transport plans in the context of an urban vision development to a sustainable one with a dynamic economy and a good quality of life for citizens.

https://workspace.imperial.ac.uk/rtsc/public/Success%20and%20Failure%20in%20Urban%20Transport%20Infrastructure%20Projects.pdf