Modeling and Evaluation of a City Logistics System with Freight Buses

Abstract

Freight bus is a new public transportation means for city logistics, and each freight bus can deliver and pick up goods at each customer/supplier location it passes. In this paper, we study the route planning problem of freight buses in an urban distribution system. Since each freight bus makes a tour visiting a set of pickup/delivery locations once at every given time interval in each day following a fixed route, the route planning problem can be considered a new variant of periodic vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery. In order to solve the problem, a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model is formulated. Based on the model, we compare a distribution system with freight buses with that without freight bus. Preliminary numerical results on randomly generated instances show that the system with freight buses can significantly reduce transportation costs compared with the system without freight buses.