Simulating impacts of regulatory policies on urban freight: application to the catering setting

Abstract

Regulatory policies aim at reducing the negative effects of urban freight transportation, especially those related to traffic, emissions and noise. Nonetheless, stakeholders in city logistics often have divergent objectives, which lead to difficulties upon defining the best possible choices regarding regulation. This paper presents a multi-agent and discrete-event based simulation of urban deliveries that aims at evaluating the impacts of regulatory policies. Restrictions regarding vehicle weights and time windows are considered in order to measure the impacts on deliveries based on total distances, number of vehicles, loading rates and air pollutant emissions. The simulation framework is applied to the delivery services for restaurants, in which 4 scenarios of regulation are evaluated in the city of Paris. One originality of the proposed approach is to use real data for the instantiation of agents and the GIS in the simulation.

Coupling Coordination Development of the Logistics Industry, New Urbanization and the Ecological Environment in the Yangtze River Economic Belt

“…Zhang et al used carbon emissions from the logistics industry and the value-added of the logistics industry as an environmental regulation indicator and found that the degree of environmental regulation has a significant contribution to logistics efficiency [42]. Another group of scholars holds the opposing view that there is a negative impact of environmental regulation on the development of the logistics industry, which is manifested in terms of additional costs, leading to the rise of enterprise management and administration costs and the difficulty of balancing technological innovation with the improvement of the production level [43,44]. As for low-carbon logistics, it mainly includes research on the problems and coping strategies of logistics industry development in the low-carbon context [45,46] and the research of incorporating carbon emissions into the evaluation system of logistics efficiency [47,48].…”