Validating the Simulated Impacts of Urban Freight Transport

Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive guide for assessing the impacts of an urban freight transport system through traffic simulation software. Based on a calibrated and validated city wide urban traffic model that integrates the freight trips of six freight vehicles in the examined day, aim of the paper is to establish an impact assessment framework that evaluates model’s environmental and transport impacts. The analysis of the freight trips showed that they account for 22009.2 g of CO2 emissions and 84.17 h of total network delays on a daily basis. Other impact assessment indicators’ values such as average vehicle speed, first attempt successful deliveries, freight vehicles’ number of roundtrips, load factor, utilization factor, emissions, traffic throughput, etc. were also computed. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.