The impact of congestion on the cost of transport in urban areas: Application for the location of an urban distribution center

In this paper, we will discuss the impact of traffic conditions, particularly congestion, on the calculation of transport costs in the urban environment. In the literature, when decisions are made to implement CDUs, and in order to minimise their implementation costs, several criteria are taken into consideration, including transport costs. These are in most cases calculated in proportion to the distance as the crow flies or the actual distance. This logic takes us away from reality and the real traffic conditions. Moreover, congestion is observed more and more in cities due to the increase in the number of vehicles while infrastructures, especially roads, do not follow, hence the importance of dealing with this problem. In order to do so, we will first define road congestion and its repercussions. Secondly, we are going to explain the method of calculating transport costs by taking congestion into account. To study our hypothesis, a real application has been presented, which deals with the problem of locating CDU by minimizing the total transport costs. To do so, we will first calculate the costs with the Cartesian coordinates of the nodes, then with the real distances in smooth traffic, and finally with the real traffic conditions, taking congestion into account.