Professors Joan Walker and Mark Hansen with grad students Ang Li, Ivan Tereshchenko and Teddy Forscher recently released a final report: Demand-Side Management of Auto Traffic for Urban Parcel Delivery for the National Institute for Congestion Reduction - NICR
Final Report: Demand-Side Management of Auto Traffic for Urban Parcel Delivery
· PIs: Joan Walker, Ph.D., Mark Hansen, Ph.D., Pei-Sung Lin, Ph.D., Zhenyu Wang, Ph.D.
· Researchers: Ang Li, Ivan Tereshchenko, Teddy Forscher, Mingchen Li, and Runan Yang
University of California, Berkeley & University of South Florida
Fueled by burgeoning e-commerce, urban parcel delivery (UPD) has emerged as a high growth market that is undergoing rapid technological change, particularly in the business-to-consumer segment. New classes of vehicles such as drones, droids, and autonomous ground vehicles, combined with new delivery models featuring crowdsourcing, parcel lockers, and mobile lockers, will enable a significant shift away from the conventional model of a dedicated delivery person operating a van. To reach the full potential of these changes to reduce costs and increase convenience, it is necessary to develop a complementary set of demand management strategies that will enable the next-generation parcel delivery system to mitigate current traffic congestion problems and avoid creating new ones.
The project aimed to (1) quantify the current and anticipated future contributions of UPD to urban congestion and related problems, such as traffic accidents and (2) identify opportunities for incentivizing consumers and delivery services to modify their behaviors to reduce the congestion impacts of UPD. To accomplish these objectives, the focus was on (1) demand models of e-commerce behaviors, (2) measuring the impact of delivery service operations on urban congestion using macroscopic fundamental diagrams, and (3) urban operations of drone deliveries to assess their potential for removing parcel delivery demand on roads.
Read the full report: https://doi.org/10.5038/CUTR-NICR-RR-2021-1-1