Fleet rerouting strategies with real-time traffic information

Abstract

The design and evaluation of City Logistics applications requires an integrated framework in which all components could work together. Therefore, City Logistics models should account for vehicle routing applications and fleet management models capable of including also the dynamic aspects of the underlying road network, namely when ICT applications are taken into account. This paper develops a methodological proposal based on an integration of vehicle routing models and real-time traffic information. In the computational experiments conducted in this paper, a dynamic traffic simulation model has been used to emulate the actual traffic conditions providing, at each time interval, estimates of the traffic state on each link of the road network that are then used, by a real time fleet management system, to determine the optimal dynamic routing and scheduling of the fleet.