Freight Routing for System Efficiency and Sustainability

The efficient supply of goods and transport of materials are important factors for sustainability in any urban environment where traffic and environmental issues also need to be addressed. In this paper we developed a centrally coordinated approach for routing freight in urban environments where traffic loads are unbalanced in time and space in an effort to improve mobility and reduce cost. We assume that freight is moved by trucks using the road network and truck fleets consist of a mix of diesel and electric trucks. We formulated the routing problem as an optimization problem with several constraints and we use a co-simulation load balancing approach to generate routes for trucks that reduce the overall cost. We use a simulation test of a road network in the Los Angeles/Long Beach Metropolitan areas that includes two major ports to demonstrate the results.