As a critical configuration of interchanges, the weaving section is inclined to be involved in more traffic accidents, which may bring about severe casualties. To identify the factors associated with traffic accidents at the weaving section, we employed the multinomial logistic regression approach to identify the correlation between six categories of risk factors (drivers’ attributes, weather conditions, traffic characteristics, driving behavior, vehicle types and temporal-spatial distribution) and four types of traffic accidents (rear-end, side wipe, collision with fixtures and rollover) based on 768 accident samples of an observed weaving section from 2016 to 2018. The modeling results show that drivers’ gender and age, weather condition, traffic density, weaving ratio, vehicle speed, lane change behavior, private cars, season, time period, day of week and accident location are important factors affecting traffic accidents at the weaving section, but they have different contributions to the four traffic accident types. The results also show that traffic density of ≥31 vehicle/100 m has the highest risk of causing rear-end accidents, weaving ration of ≥41% has the highest possibility to bring about a side wipe incident, collision with fixtures is the most likely to happen in snowy weather, and rollover is the most likely incident to occur in rainy weather.

The last mile problem of E-grocery Distribution comprises one of the most costly and highest polluting components of the supply chain in which companies deliver goods to end customers. To reduce transport cost and fuel emissions, a new element of ground-based delivery services, autonomous delivery vehicles (ADVs), is included in the E-grocery distribution system for improving delivery efficiency. Thus, the objective of this study is to optimize a two-echelon distribution network for efficient E-grocery delivery, where conventional vans serve the delivery in the first echelon and ADVs serve delivery in the second echelon. The problem is formulated as a two-echelon vehicle routing problem with mixed vehicles (2E-VRP-MV) with a nonlinear objective function, in which the total transport and emission costs are optimized. This optimization is based on the flow assignment at each echelon and to realize routing choice for both the van and ADV. A two-step clustering-based hybrid Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization (C-GA-PSO) algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. First, the end customers are clustered to the intermediate depots, named satellites, based on the minimized distance and maximized demand. To enhance the efficiency of resolving the 2E-VRP-MV-model, a hybrid GA-PSO algorithm is adopted to solve the vehicle routing problem. Computational results of up to 21, 32, 50, and 100 customers show the effectiveness of the methods developed here. At last, the impacts of the layout of the depot-customer and customer density on the total cost are analyzed. This study sheds light on the tactical planning of the multi-echelon sustainable E-grocery delivery network.

Existing Dynamic Traffic Assignment (DTA) models assign traffic flow with the principle of travel time, which are easy to distribute most of the traffic flows on the shortest path. A serious unbalance of traffic flow in the network can speed up pavement deterioration of highways with heavy traffic, which influences the sustainability of pavement performance and increases maintenance expenditures. The purpose of this research is to obtain a more optimized traffic assignment for pavement damage reduction by establishing a multi-objective DTA model with the objectives of not only minimum travel time but minimum decline of Present Serviceability Index (PSI) for pavements. Then, teaching-learning-based optimization (TLBO) algorithm is utilized to solve the proposed model. Results of a case study indicate that a more balanced traffic flow assignment can be realized by the model, which can effectively reduce average PSI loss, save maintenance expenditures, extend pavement service life span, save fuel consumption and reduce pollutant emissions in spite of a little increase of average travel time. Additionally, sensitivity of weight factor for the two objective functions is analyzed. This research provides some insights on methods on sustainable pavement performance.