Publications

Summary:
Competition throughout the urban freight supply chain is steadily growing. Companies need to devise innovative methods for the transportation of goods from raw materials all the way to the final consumer. From concept to practice, it can be challenging to identify affordable solutions.

Summary:
This life cycle assessment case study puts the supply chain contribution of transportation to greenhouse gas emissions in context with other contributors using American wheat grain as a representative product. Multiple locations, species and routes to market are investigated.

Summary:
As one of the nation’s first zero-emissions last-mile delivery pilots, the Seattle Neighborhood Delivery Hub served as a testbed for innovative sustainable urban logistics strategies on the ground in Seattle’s dense Uptown neighborhood.

Summary:
Growing pressure to limit greenhouse gas emissions is changing the way businesses operate. This paper presents the trade-offs between cost, service quality (represented by time window guarantees), and emissions of an urban pickup and delivery system under these changing pressures. A model, developed by the authors in ArcGIS, is used to evaluate these trade-offs for a specific case study involving a real fleet with specific operational characteristics.

Summary:
In recent years, e-commerce has dramatically increased deliveries to residential areas. The rise in delivery vehicle activity creates externalities for the transportation system, including congestion, competition for parking space, and emissions. Common carrier lockers have emerged as a way to manage these effects by consolidating deliveries, but they remain largely untested in the United States.

Summary:
While recent urban planning efforts have focused on smart growth development and management of growth into developed areas, the research community has not examined the impacts of these development patterns on urban goods movement. Successful implementation of growth strategies has multiple environmental and social benefits, but it also raises the demand for intraurban goods movement, potentially increasing conflicts between modes of travel and worsening air quality.

Summary:
The objectives of this project are to develop and implement a technology solution to support research, development, and demonstration of data processing techniques, models, simulations, a smart phone application, and a visual-confirmation system to: Reduce delivery vehicle parking seeking behavior by approximately 20% in the pilot test area, by returning current and predicted load/unload space occupancy information to users on a web-based and/or mobile platform, to inform real-time parking decis…

Summary:
A case study of the University of Washington Mailing Services, which operates a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles, provides insight into the impact of operational changes on cost, service quality, and emissions. An emissions minimization problem was formulated and solutions were identified with a creation and local search algorithm based on the I1 and 2-opts heuristics.

Summary:
This paper discusses how to promote high-speed rail (HSR) freight business by solving the congestion problem. First, we define the existing operation modes in China and propose the idea of relieving congestion by reserving more carriages of HSR passenger trains for freight between cities with large potential volume or small capacity.

Summary:
This study performed an empirical analysis to evaluate the implementation of a cargo e-bike delivery system pilot tested by the United Parcel Service, Inc. (UPS) in Seattle, Washington. During the pilot, a cargo e-bike with a removable cargo container was used to perform last-mile deliveries in downtown Seattle. Cargo containers were pre-loaded daily at the UPS Seattle depot and loaded onto a trailer, which was then carried to a parking lot in downtown.