Short- and mid-term evaluation of the use of electric vehicles in urban freight transport collaborative networks: a case study

ABSTRACT

Despite its negative impacts, freight transportation is a primary component of all supply chains. Decision makers have considered diverse strategies, such as Horizontal Collaboration (HC) and the usage of alternative types of vehicles, to reduce overall cost and the related environmental and social impacts. This paper assesses the implementation of an electric fleet of vehicles in urban goods distribution under HC strategy between carriers. A biased randomisation based algorithm is used to solve the problem with a multi-objective function to explore the relationships between both delivery and environmental costs. Real data from the city of Bogotá, Colombia are used to validate this approach. Experiments with different costs and demands projections are performed to analyse short- and medium-term impacts related to the usage of electric vehicles in collaborative networks. Results show that the optimal selection of vehicle types depends considerably on the time horizon evaluation and demand variation.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban freight transport
• horizontal collaboration
• sustainability
• electric vehicles
• multi-objective optimisation
• case study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Andrés Muñoz-Villamizar http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2542-0645

Carlos L. Quintero-Araújo http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8563-4456

Jairo R. Montoya-Torres http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6251-3667

Javier Faulin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2613-6155

Additional information

Funding

This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (TRA2013-48180-C3-P and TRA2015-71883-REDT) and the Ibero-American Program for Science and Technology for Development (CYTED2014-515RT0489). Likewise, we want to acknowledge the support received by the Special Patrimonial Fund from Universidad de La Sabana (Colombia) and the doctoral grant from the UOC-Open University of Catalonia (Spain).