Synthesis of Urban Freight Transport Demand: The Case of Last-Mile Food Deliveries

Demand for freight transport results from the spatial separation of shippers and recipients. Only after these two parties agreed to a relationship are all other logistics and transport decisions made. Thus, the relationships between shippers and recipients are of great importance. For this reason, the allocation of shippers and recipients, also is worth addressing from a modeling perspective. To arrive at a synthetic population of shippers and recipients, a heuristic optimization method that combines priority labeling and a simulated annealing algorithm was developed. The model was applied to a real-life case study of last-mile deliveries in food retail in Berlin, which was based on existing nationwide survey data and other open-source data.