Smart urban freight transport: tools for planning and optimising delivery operations

Delivery bay availability for loading and unloading operations is critical to reduce times and costs of logistics operations, as well as for improving city sustainability and liveability. Beyond defining the appropriate number and location of such bays, urban sustainability and liveability can be improved with telematics tools which enable real-time bay reservation and monitoring, integrating such information within freight routing solutions. This paper presents an architecture for such tools along with methodology integrating delivery bay planning with transportation demand modelling through simulation, allowing computation of performance indicators to be used for ex-ante assessment in planning delivery scenarios. The results were validated through a simulation-based approach on Rome's limited traffic zone.