Urban Freight Vehicle Flows: an Analysis of Freight Delivery Patterns through Floating Car Data

The assessment procedures of city logistics scenarios require the simulation of freight transport demand and hence the estimation of freight vehicle origin-destination (O-D) flows. These O-D flows can be obtained from the simulation of delivery tours. Therefore, the paper recalls a system of models able to simulate delivery tours using an aggregate approach proposed by the authors and presents the propaedeutic analysis for setting up such a tool. The data come from a dataset of commercial vehicles operating in the Veneto Region (Italy) for which floating car data (FCD) of 60 operating-days were available. The analysis allowed us to investigate the current patters of delivering tours and to point out some evidences on which models for delivering simulation can be based.