Optimal urban goods movement planning taking independent retailer restocking activities into consideration

The main aim of this research is to help the local authorities to better manage the urban goods movements (UGM) in cities. Particularly this research develops an integrated framework to analyse the impact of local authority policies by linking retailer logistic decisions as well as passenger movements with traffic conditions on the road network. The particular aim of this modelling approach is to identify the city logistics policies that meet local authority objectives to optimise urban road networks as well as incorporating retailers and other road user behaviour in response to traffic congestion.
The modelling framework is formulated as a bilevel optimisation problem in which the upper level problem represents the local authority objective, while the lower level problem constitutes the user equilibrium traffic assignment problem incorporating the traffic demand from UGM activities as well as passenger movement.
An analysis of independent retailers’ restocking activities is done to represent the demand for UGM activities in the cities. Independent retailers, prevalent in developing countries, have different decision-making processes compared to the more studied chained retailers. In particular, independent retailers usually rely on their own vehicles to run their businesses and are strongly influenced by the presence of traditional markets. This thesis utilises regression methods and a discrete choice model to quantify the factors affecting the independent retailers’ restocking trips and their subsequent logistic decisions.
The current study extends the state of the art of UGM model in the literature in two areas: (i) the bilevel model explicitly considers the interest of the three actors involved in the UGM activities viz. local authorities, retailers and road users, by setting up an optimisation problem to maximise the overall welfare; (ii) the demand models investigate deeper insights into independent retailer restocking activities.
The results for the demand modelling estimation for retailers in Bandung city centre show that vehicle ownership and the presence of traditional markets play an important role in shaping independent retailer decisions.
The application of the bilevel modelling framework for Bandung city centre reveals that restricting commercial vehicles and applying toll charges for commercial vehicles could increase the overall welfare of all road users. However, the policy must be carefully applied since it could produce an unwanted result. For example, applying a sub-optimal toll produces sub-optimal welfare gain for all road users or even disbenefit for particular road users