An innovative approach to connect parcel delivery operations with urban congestion

Journey speeds, which include driving and stopping, are important parameters for the vehicle routing calculations of any pick-up and delivery service. So far, journey speeds have predominantly been considered as exogenous and invariant to the interaction effects with multi-modal traffic. With growing fleet sizes, the resulting journey speeds can become endogenous in the vehicle routing as they result from the decisions of various multi-modal actors. Thus, proper speed predictions are essential for the delivery service quality and related business decisions. This paper proposes an innovative approach based on the macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) to describe multi-modal interactions in the endogenous and dynamic evolution of congestion for bi-modal traffic of cars and urban freight vehicles (UFV) for parcel delivery. The approach is abstract and can be applied to any pick-up and delivery service. It helps cities to derive urban freight transport strategies and businesses to make better decisions.