Freight Buses in Three-Tiered Distribution Systems for City Logistics: Modeling and Evaluation

Abstract : In this paper, we put forward the concept of freight bus, which is a new public transport means that can replace city freighters operated by different private logistics companies in a city. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of freight buses for city logistics, we build a mathematical programming model for the routing planning of freight buses. Based on the model, we compare a distribution system with freight buses and the corresponding system without freight bus. Preliminary numerical results on randomly generated instances show that the system with freight buses can significantly reduce transportation costs compared with the system without freight buses.