Simulating impacts of regulatory policies on urban freight: application to the catering setting

Regulatory policies aim at reducing the negative effects of urban freight transportation, especially those related to traffic, emissions and noise. Nonetheless, stakeholders in city logistics often have divergent objectives, which lead to difficulties upon defining the best possible choices regarding regulation. This paper presents a multi-agent and discrete-event based simulation of urban deliveries that aims at evaluating the impacts of regulatory policies. Restrictions regarding vehicle weights and time windows are considered in order to measure the impacts on deliveries based on total distances, number of vehicles, loading rates and air pollutant emissions. The simulation framework is applied to the delivery services for restaurants, in which 4 scenarios of regulation are evaluated in the city of Paris. One originality of the proposed approach is to use real data for the instantiation of agents and the GIS in the simulation.