Synthesis of urban freight transport demand: A case of last mile food deliveries

Abstract

Demand for freight transport results from the spatial separation of shippers and recipients. Only after these two parties agreed to tie a relationship, all further logistics decisions and decisions on the transport itself are drawn. Thus, the relationship between shippers and recipients are of great importance. For this reason, the allocation of shippers and recipients, respective producers and consumers also is worthwile to be addressed from a modeling perspective. In order to arrive at a synthetic population of shippers and recipients, respective producers and consumers, a heuristic optimization method that combines priority labeling and a simulated annealing algorithm was developed. The model has been applied to a real-life case study of last-mile deliveries in food retail in Berlin, which is based on existing nationwide survey data and other open source data.