Urban Freight Modelling: A Review

This paper proposes a review of a few current models developed about urban goods movement thanks to a work carried out in the frame of the BESTUFS EU Coordination Action and a set of relevant papers concerning this field. In spite of a recent concern about this question, the operational and really implemented models are relatively scarce in comparison with the urban passenger and car traffic models or with the interurban freight traffic models. This paper focuses on urban goods movement modeling in Western Europe and Northern America and will try to enlighten the main features, according to each specific historical, institutional, demographic and geographic context, as well as the availability of data and the choices of modeling methods and their implementation. In the end, three models are selected for more detailed description and comparison: TLUMIP from USA, VISEVA-W and FRETURB from European Union.