Delivering Goods in Urban Areas: How to Deal with Urban Policy Restrictions and the Environment

Abstract

Time-access regulations and vehicle restrictions are increasingly used, especially in western Europe, to improve social sustainability in urban areas. These regulations considerably affect the distribution process of retail chain organizations as well as the environmental burden. This paper studies the impact of governmental time windows, vehicle restrictions, and different retailers' logistical concepts on the financial and environmental performance of retailers. We use a case study with two cases that differ in their drop sizes as input for an experiment. The retailers provided all organizational, flow, and cost data of the distribution process between their distribution centers and their stores. We use these data to calculate the impacts of different scenarios on the retailers' financial and environmental performances based on a fractional factorial design in which urban policies and the retailers' logistical concepts are varied, using vehicle routing software. We test the propositions with a third case. We show that the cost impact of time windows is the largest for retailers who combine many deliveries in one vehicle round-trip. The cost increase due to vehicle restrictions is the largest for retailers whose round-trip lengths are restricted by vehicle capacity. Vehicle restrictions and time windows together do not increase a retailer's cost more than individually. Variations in delivery volume and store dispersion hardly influence the impact of urban policy and the retailer's logistical concept decisions.

City Logistics – Status and Trends

“…However, the results of the application do not show the expected effects even in the terms of ecology. In addition, prohibitive and restrictive measures limit the realization of logistics activities, instead of making them more efficient and sustainable (Allen et al, 2000;Ballantyne et al, 2013;Dablanc, 2007;Holguin-Veras et al, 2013;Quak, 2008;Quak and de Koster, 2009;Tadić et al, 2014b). On the other hand, the relaxation of restrictions for freight vehicles can cause economic and environmental benefits (McKinnon, 2005), reducing the total delivery and collection time, and the number of vehicles in the urban areas (Anderson et al, 2005).…”

Quantitative assessment of sustainable city logistics

“…This is a field that has been investigated in recent years (Quak & de Koster, 2009;Gonzalez-Feliu et al, 2012;Stathopoulos et al, 2012). Given the heterogeneity of the interests of these stakeholders, coordination becomes somewhat cumbersome, so they generally act independently and without any centralized control.…”

Multiphase Approach to Developing Model of Logistics for Coastal Tourist Destinations

“…In order to describe two-echelon vehicle model [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23], let us consider a transportation carrier that has to deliver goods to a set of NC destinations, called customers. A quantity of freight qi to be delivered, called demand, is associated to each customer i.…”