Estimating emissions from regional freight delivery under different urban development scenarios

Abstract

This study aims to develop a regional freight-shipment model to forecast freight movement within freight-delivery regions and examine the relationship between regional freight-shipment activities and the related environmental problems such as air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. A methodology for freight distribution and collection within geographical regions is proposed, in which a significantly large number of freight demand or supply points needs to be served. This problem can be considered as a large-scale vehicle routing problem and solved by an asymptotic approximation method. A set of closed-form formulas is constructed to obtain a near-optimal total travel distance of a fleet of trucks from multiple distribution centers. A case study is conducted to forecast regional freight-delivery cost in the selected metropolitan areas in the United States. Numerical results under three urban development scenarios show that the proposed methodology can be used to estimate the total cost and related vehicle emissions effectively.