Freight Traffic Control 2050: transforming the energy demands of last-mile urban freight through collaborative logistics

研究背景：货运占英国城镇所有机动道路车辆活动的16%，因此是化石燃料的主要消费者，也是二氧化碳和空气污染的主要贡献者。在伦敦，公路货运分别占道路二氧化碳、氮氧化物和PM10排放总量的23%、36%和39%。货车流量预计将强劲增长，原因如下：1)对购买商品和履行配送的新方式（包括在线购物）的需求不断增长。2)通过提高城市化水平和迁移模式扩大城市人口。3)城市去工业化和服务型经济的兴起。4)对公用事业和建筑等外包服务功能的需求不断增加。5)物流扩张，仓库搬迁到城市边缘，导致行程更长。与许多其他行业不同，货运业对新进入者几乎没有什么障碍，而且是一个竞争激烈的市场，其特点是利润率低，运营商数量众多。由于存在激烈的竞争，这些运营商传统上彼此隔离运营，车辆利用率低，交付轮次重叠，导致交通拥堵，污染和能源需求增加。目的和目标：我们的研究愿景是了解包裹承运人之间更紧密的运营合作在多大程度上提供了减少城市交通和能源需求的潜力，同时仍然保持客户服务水平，以及这种关系在商业环境中可以自然发展到何种程度，或者第三方“货运交通控制器”（FTC）是否有助于确保整个城市地区的需求公平分配。我们的主要研究目标是：1。调查当前包裹运输活动的集体运输和能源影响；2 .建立数据库，收集和查询不同运营商提供的收发货时间表；3 .将这些数据与一系列优化算法一起使用，以调查如果承运商之间更公平地共享交付和收集，则潜在的运输和能源效益，并开发工具来帮助可视化这些效益；4 .评估需要什么样的商业模式才能使运营商以这种方式进行合作；5 .调查第三方“货运交通管制员”在促进承运人之间的合作以减少整个城市的能源需求和车辆影响方面可以发挥的作用；识别与此类协作计划的接收、处理和可视化相关的关键法律和隐私问题。潜在的应用和好处：我们的研究成果将由TNT和Gnewt Cargo作为项目的一部分进行试验，并将为他们和其他承运人提供证据，证明采用协作收集和交付时间表管理的切实好处，以更好地利用他们在城市中心的车辆。如果商业模式证明是成功的，它们将被转移到城市货运的其他重要部门（例如建筑、废物、食品和服务物流）。我们还将向伦敦交通局和其他城市规划当局提供政策见解，说明FTC概念的优点，以控制进入其城市中心的货运车辆，并协助他们在2030年之前引入无二氧化碳城市物流的指令。希望商业化开发FTC概念的系统设计师将受益于我们的方法，用于集成、建模和可视化用于协作决策支持的大量数据集，以及如何处理与处理多客户端数据相关的商业和隐私问题。运筹学社区将从优化和博弈模型中受益，因为它们将为如何有效地将这些工具用于非常大的数据集提供新的见解。

CONTEXT OF THE RESEARCH: Freight transport accounts for 16% of all motorised road vehicle activity in British towns and cities and is therefore a major consumer of fossil fuels and contributor to CO2 and air pollution. In London, road freight transport accounts for 23%, 36% and 39% of total road-based CO2, NOx and PM10 emissions respectively. Van traffic is forecast to grow strongly as a result of:1) Growing demand for new ways of buying goods and fulfilling deliveries including online shopping.2) Expanding urban populations through greater levels of urbanisation and migration patterns.3) Urban de-industrialisation and the rise of the service-based economy.4) Increasing demand for outsourced servicing functions such as the provision of utilities and construction.5) Logistics sprawl, with warehouses relocated to the edge of the urban area result in longer journeys. Unlike many other sectors, the freight industry has few barriers to new entrants and is a highly competitive marketplace characterised by low-profit margins and a proliferation of operators. Due to the fierce competition that exists, these carriers traditionally operate in isolation of each other with poor vehicle utilisation rates and delivery rounds that overlap, leading to increased traffic congestion, pollution and demands for energy.Aims and Objectives: Our research vision is to understand the extent to which closer operational collaboration between parcel carriers offers the potential to reduce urban traffic and energy demand whilst still maintaining customer service levels, and to what extent such relationships can develop naturally within a commercial setting or whether a 3rd party 'Freight Traffic Controller' (FTC) would be instrumental to ensure the equitable distribution of demand across an urban area. Our key research objectives are to:1. Investigate the collective transport and energy impacts of current parcel carrier activities;2. Create a database to gather and interrogate collection and delivery schedules supplied by different carriers;3. Use the data with a series of optimisation algorithms to investigate the potential transport and energy benefits if carriers were to share deliveries and collections more equitably between them and develop tools to help visualise those benefits;4. Evaluate what business models would be needed to enable carriers to collaborate in this way;5. Investigate the role a 3rd party 'Freight Traffic Controller' could play in stimulating collaboration between carriers to reduce energy demand and vehicle impacts across a city;6. Identify the key legal and privacy issues associated with the receipt, processing and visualisation of such collaborative schedules.POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS AND BENEFITS: Our research outcomes will be trialled by TNT and Gnewt Cargo as part of the project and will provide them and other carriers with evidence of the tangible benefits from adopting collaborative collection and delivery schedule management for better utilising their vehicles in urban centres. Should the business models prove successful, they will be transferable to other important sectors of urban freight transport (e.g. construction, waste, food and service-based logistics). We will also provide policy insight to Transport for London and other urban planning authorities into the merits of the FTC concept for controlling freight vehicles entering their urban centres and aiding their directive of introducing CO2 free city logistics by 2030. System designers looking to commercially develop the FTC concept will benefit from our approaches for integrating, modelling and visualising vast data sets for collaborative decision support, and how to navigate the commercial and privacy issues associated with handling multi-client data. The Operational Research community will benefit from the optimisation and gaming models as they will give a new insight into how such tools can be effectively used with very large data sets.