An application of an urban freight transportation system for reduced environmental emissions

Abstract

Today, there is a great need for greener urban freight transportations due to their ever-increasing environmental impact. The planet’s climate has been significantly affected as the temperature is constantly rising and extreme weather events are occurring more and more often. Aiming to reduce the environmental impact of freight transportation in urban areas, an advanced vehicle routing and scheduling system for improving urban freight transportations, has been developed. This paper presents the functionality of the advanced system, while also analyzing its subsystems and demonstrating its use in a case study. The system is provided as an integrated cloud-based software to support the needs of logistics companies, in order to efficiently schedule their deliveries and perform the routing of their vehicles. The utilized multi-objective algorithm produces solutions that minimize either the distribution cost or the environmental emissions or a combination of these parameters. An application of the system is performed for validation purposes, concerning the comparison of the system’s results with corresponding real-life data provided by a medium-sized logistics company. The results of the testing reveal its significant contribution to the reduction of the environmental impact of the company’s distribution services.