An advanced planner for urban freight delivering

The paper aims at introducing an advanced delivery tour planner to support operators in urban delivery operations through a combined approach which chooses delivery bays and delivery time windows while optimizing the delivery routes. After a literature review on tools for the management and the control of the delivery system implemented for optimizing the usage of on-street delivery bays, a prototypical tour delivery planner is described. The tool allows transport and logistics operators to book the delivery bays and to have real-time suggestions on the delivery tour to follow, through the minimization of the total delivery time. Currently, at development phase, the tool has been tested in a target zone, considering the road network and time/city delivering constraints and real-time data about vehicles location, traffic and delivery bay availability. The tool identifies the possible tours based on the delivery preferences, ranks the possible solutions according to the total route time based on information on the road network (i.e. travel time forecasts), performs a further optimization to reduce the total travel times and presents the user the best alternative along with the indications of which delivery bay to use in each delivery stop. The developed prototype is composed by two main parts: a web application that manages communication between the database and the road network simulation, and, an Android mobile App that supports transport and logistic operators in managing their delivering, pre trip and en route, showing and updating routing based on real-time information.