Decision Support System for Real-Time Urban Freight Management

The urban network is a highly dynamic system. Thus, a modern and efficient fleet management in urban areas should account for dynamics of traffic conditions and variability in travel times, since they significantly affect the distribution of goods and the provision of services. For the proficient dynamic fleet management decisions it is proper instead of relying exclusively on the experience of a dispatcher, to base the freight management decisions on information provided by a professional Decision Support System (DSS), which facilitates the consideration of all the factors conditioning the addressed problem. This paper provides a proposal of such DSS for real-time freight management. Its design is based on integration of selected pickup and delivery vehicle routing model and dynamic traffic simulation models, which objective is to carefully emulate the evolving traffic conditions. The optimal dynamic routing and scheduling of a vehicle fleet is obtained due to dynamic modifications of the current routing and scheduling plan on the basis of the newly revealed information conditioning the addressed problem.