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Urban Freight Lab

Research Topic: Logistics and Supply Chain

The supply chain is the movement of raw materials and parts from the beginning of production through delivery to the consumer. Logistics is the aspect of supply chain management that plans, implements, and controls the efficient, effective forward and reverse flow and storage of goods, services, and related information between the point of origin and the point of consumption to meet customers’ requirements.

Technical Report

Structural and Geographic Shifts in the Washington Warehousing Industry: Transportation Impacts for the Green River Valley

 
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URL: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/17233
Publication: Transportation Northwest (TransNow)
Publication Date: 2009
Summary:
Establishment level employment data indicate that the warehousing industry has experienced rapid growth and restructuring since 1998. This restructuring has resulted in geographic shifts at the national, regional, and local scales. Uneven growth in warehousing establishments across the Pacific Northwest has likely exerted a significant impact on the regional transportation system, but the extent of these transportation impacts remains unknown. Identifying these impacts is the goal of our proposed study. Recent and ongoing research indicates that growth in the warehousing industry is profound. County Business Patterns data published by the US Census Bureau indicates that at the national level, the number of warehousing establishments grew by just over 100 percent from 1998 to 2005. In 1998 there were 6,712 warehousing establishments in the US. By 2005, that number had increased to 13,483. Although a wide range exists within the warehousing industry, interview data collected by the authors of this proposal indicate that each warehouse handles between 25 and 100 trucks, or 50 and 200 trips, hence the location of warehousing establishments has a significant impact on transportation systems. At the county level, we see that in Washington, King County experienced the strongest absolute growth, adding 59 establishments to the 61 reported in 1998. In relative terms, however, Pierce County added warehousing establishments at a faster rate (159 percent) than any other county. The preliminary data produced in Goodchild and Andreoli’s report clearly indicate that there has been strong growth in warehousing establishments at the national and state levels, but that the growth has not been even across states and counties. From a transportation perspective, these findings suggest that future research needs to focus on how these structural and geographic shifts impact regional and local transportation systems.

 

 

Authors: Dr. Anne Goodchild, Derek Andrioli
Recommended Citation:
Goodchild, A., & Andrioli, D. (2009). Structural and Geographic Shifts in the Washington Warehousing Industry: Transportation Impacts for the Green River Valley (No. TNW2009-04). Transportation Northwest (Organization).
Report

Mapping the Challenges to Sustainable Urban Freight

 
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Publication Date: 2022
Summary:

Just as there has been a push for more climate-friendly passenger travel in recent years, that same push is building for freight travel. At the same time ecommerce is booming and goods delivery in cities is rising, sustainability has become a policy focus for city governments and a corporate priority for companies.

Why? Cities report being motivated to be responsive to residents, businesses, and the goals of elected leaders. Companies report being motivated by cost reduction, efficiency, branding and customer loyalty, and corporate responsibility.

For its part, Amazon in 2019 pledged to become a net-zero carbon business by 2040. In the wake of that pledge, Amazon financially supported this Urban Freight Lab research examining two key questions:

  1. What is the current state of sustainable urban freight planning in the United States?
  2. What are the challenges to achieving a sustainable urban freight system in the United States and Canada?

Because the research literature reveals that denser, more populous cities are the areas most impacted by climate change, we focused our analysis on the 58 cities representing the largest, densest, and fastest-growing cities in the U.S. found within the nation’s 25 largest, densest, and fastest-growing metro areas. Our population, growth, and density focus resulted in heavy concentration in California, Texas, and Florida and light representation in the Midwest.

Within those 58 cities, we reviewed 243 city planning documents related to transportation and conducted 25 interviews with public and private stakeholders. We intentionally sought out both the public and private sectors because actors in each are setting carbon-reduction goals and drafting plans and taking actions to address climate change in the urban freight space.

In our research, we found that:

  1. The overwhelming majority of cities currently have no plans to support sustainable urban freight. As of today, ten percent of the cities considered in this research have taken meaningful steps towards decarbonizing the sector.
  2. Supply chains are complex and the focus on urban supply chain sustainability is relatively new. This reality helps explain the myriad challenges to moving toward a sustainable urban freight system.
  3. For city governments, those challenges include a need to adapt existing tools and policy levers or create new ones, as well as a lack of resources and leadership to make an impact in the industry.
  4. For companies, those challenges include concerns about the time, cost, technology, and labor complexity such moves could require.

“Sustainability” can mean many things. In this research, we define sustainable urban freight as that which reduces carbon dioxide emissions, with their elimination—which we refer to as decarbonization—as the ultimate end goal. This definition represents just one environmental impact of urban freight and does not include, for example, noise pollution, NOx or SOx emissions, black carbon, or particulate matter.

We define urban freight as last-mile delivery within cities, including parcel deliveries made by companies like Amazon and UPS and wholesale deliveries made by companies like Costco and Pepsi. We do not include regional or drayage/port freight as those merely transit through cities and face distinct sustainability barriers.

Authors: Urban Freight Lab
Recommended Citation:
Urban Freight Lab (2022). Mapping the Challenges to Sustainable Urban Freight.
Technical Report

Cost, Emissions, and Customer Service Trade-Off Analysis In Pickup and Delivery Systems

URL: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/24904
Publication: Oregon Department of Transportation, Research Section
Publication Date: 2011
Summary:

This research offers a novel formulation for including emissions into fleet assignment and vehicle routing and for the trade-offs faced by fleet operators between cost, emissions, and service quality. This approach enables evaluation of the impact of a variety of internal changes (e.g. time window schemes) and external policies (e.g. spatial restrictions), and enables comparisons of the relative impacts on fleet emissions. To apply the above approach to real fleets, three different case studies were developed. Each of these cases has significant differences in their fleet composition, customers’ requirements, and operational features that provide this research with the opportunity to explore different scenarios.

The research includes estimations of the impact on cost and CO2 and NOX emissions from fleet upgrades, the impact on cost, emissions, and customer wait time when demand density or location changes, and the impact on cost, emissions, and customer wait time from congestion and time window flexibility. Additionally, it shows that any infrastructure use restriction increases cost and emissions. A discussion of the implications for policymakers and fleet operators in a variety of physical and transportation environments is also presented.

Authors: Dr. Anne Goodchild, Felipe Sandoval
Recommended Citation:
Goodchild, A., & Sandoval, F. (2011). Cost, Emissions, and Customer Service Trade-Off Analysis In Pickup and Delivery Systems (No. OR-RD 11-13). Oregon Department of Transportation Research Section.
Article

Urban Freight Innovation: Leading-Edge Strategies for Smart Cities

 
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URL: https://www.dco.uscg.mil/Portals/9/DCO%20Documents/Proceedings%20Magazine/Archive/2021/Vol78_No2_Fall21.pdf
Publication: Coast Guard Journal of Safety & Security at Sea, Proceedings of the Marine Safety & Security Council
Volume: 78:02:00
Publication Date: 2021
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. This article highlights recent research conducted by the University of Washington’s Urban Freight Lab and its partners to explore new methods to reduce transportation costs, improve the customer experience, reduce carbon footprint, and reduce urban congestion after goods leave the shipping docks.

Authors: Dr. Anne GoodchildBill KeoughDr. Giacomo Dalla Chiara
Recommended Citation:
Bill Keough, Anne Goodchild, & Giacomo Dalla Chiara. (2021). Urban Freight Innovation: Leading-Edge Strategies for Smart Cities. Proceedings of the Marine Safety & Security Council, 78(2).
Technical Report

Characterizing Washington State’s Supply Chains

URL: https://trid.trb.org/view/1213868
Publication: Transportation Northwest Regional Center X (TransNow)
Publication Date: 2012
Summary:

The University of Washington (UW), Washington State University (WSU), and Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) recently developed a multi-modal statewide geographic information system (GIS) model that can help the state prioritize strategies that protect industries most vulnerable to disruptions, supporting economic activity in the state and increasing economic resilience. The proposed research was identified after that project as an important step in improving the model’s ability to measure the impact of disruptions. In addition to developing the model, the researchers developed two case studies showing the model’s capabilities: the potato growing and processing industry was chosen as a representative agricultural sector and diesel fuel distribution for its importance to all industry sectors. As origin-destination data for other freight-dependent sectors is added to the model, WSDOT will be able to evaluate the impact of freight system disruptions on each of them. Moving forward, it is not cost-effective to develop case studies in the manner used for these case studies, therefore, the state is currently supporting activities at the national level that will provide methods for collecting statewide commodity flow data. However, this commodity flow data will still lack important operational detail necessary to understand the impacts of transportation changes. This research will begin to fill that gap by developing a transportation-based categorization of logistics chains. The goal is not to capture all of the complexity of supply chain logistics but to identify approximately 15-20 categories within which supply chains behave similarly from a transportation perspective, for example, in their level of scheduling and methods for route selection. Researchers will use existing publicly available data, conduct an operational survey, and analyze GPS data collected for WSDOT’s freight performance measures project to identify the categorization.

Authors: Dr. Anne Goodchild, Andrea Gagliano, Maura Rowell
Recommended Citation:
Goodchild, A., Gagliano, A., & Rowell, M. (2012). Characterizing Washington State’s Supply Chains (No. TNW2012-13).

Dr. Anne Goodchild

Dr. Anne Goodchild
Dr. Anne Goodchild
  • Founder, Urban Freight Lab
  • Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
annegood@uw.edu  |  206-543-3747  |  Wilson Ceramics Lab 103
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  • Urban goods delivery systems and land use
  • Logistics hubs and ports
  • Sustainable freight transportation systems
  • Supply chain management and freight transportation

Dr. Anne Goodchild is interested in the intersection between supply chain management and freight transportation. As an example of this, recent research is evaluating the changing nature of shopping and implications for goods delivery on CO2 emissions, local pollutants, and vehicle miles travelled. Her interest in economic and environmental sustainability is also demonstrated by her work looking at CO2 emissions in strategic routing and schedule planning in urban pick-up and delivery systems. Dr. Goodchild’s work in understanding supply chains, as they relate to the transport system, is demonstrated by her research funded by the SHRP2 freight data and modeling program, NCFRP 20, the FHWA’s Behavioral based National Freight Demand Model, and surveys and analysis funded by both the Washington and Oregon Departments of Transportation.

  • Innovation in Education Award, Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Transportation Education Council (2021)
  • Outstanding Researcher Award, Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans) (2021)
  • Outstanding Mentor Award, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (2020)
  • Person of the Year, Transportation Club of Seattle (2017)
  • Allan and Inger Osberg Endowed Professorship (2012 – 2016)
  • Community of Innovators Junior Faculty Research Award, College of Engineering (2012)
  • 2nd Prize, College-Industry Council on MH Education Outstanding Material Handling and Logistics paper (2008)
  • Dissertation Prize Honorable Mention, INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics (2006)
  • PRISMS Presentation Competition Finalist, Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (2003)
  • Ph.D., Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley (2005)
    (Dissertation: Crane Double Cycling in Container Ports: Algorithms, Evaluation, and Planning)
  • M.S., Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley (2003)
  • B.S., Mathematics, UC Davis (1995)

Dr. Anne Goodchild leads the University of Washington’s academic and research efforts in the area of supply chain, logistics, and freight transportation. She is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Founder of both the Supply Chain Transportation & Logistics online Master’s degree program and the Urban Freight Lab (UFL).

Under Goodchild’s leadership, the UFL coined the increasingly used term “Final 50 Feet” and defined it as the last leg of the supply chain for urban deliveries—including finding parking, moving items from a delivery vehicle, navigating traffic, sidewalks, intersections, bike lanes, and building security, and ending with the recipient. In addition to being key to customer satisfaction, this final segment is both the most expensive (where an estimated 25-50% of total supply chain costs are incurred) and most time-consuming part of the delivery process—and ripe for improvement. One of the hurdles in the final 50 feet is that many different parties are involved—city departments of transportation, delivery carriers, property owners, residents, and consumers—making a collaborative effort between sectors essential for developing mutually beneficial solutions. Using a systems engineering approach, the UFL has completed innovative research projects that provide foundational data and proven strategies, such as:

Dr. Goodchild’s contributions to transportation engineering in the U.S. and abroad have been significant. She is an expert in international border and port operations and has been instrumental in bringing supply chain concepts to freight model architectures. She has worked at the forefront of GPS data applications, identifying observable transportation characteristics that statistically predict transportation behavior.

She is the author or co-author of more than 100 research publications, and serves as associate editor for the peer-reviewed scientific journal Transportation Letters. From 2016 to 2018 she chaired the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s Transportation Research Board (TRB) Freight and Marine Chairs group, the top national research organization in her field. She teaches logistics and analysis, global trade, transportation & logistics management, and advises graduate students in transportation engineering, and has won several teaching and research awards.

Dr. Goodchild is the recipient of numerous research grants, including recent awards from the U.S. Department of Transportation, PacTrans (Regional University Transportation Center for Federal Region 10), Seattle Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration’s Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP2), TRB’s National Cooperative Freight Research Program, and the Washington and Oregon State Departments of Transportation.

Dr. Goodchild holds both a doctorate (2005) and a master’s degree (2003) in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree (with high honors) in mathematics from University of California, Davis. Before earning her Ph.D. she worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and Applied Decision Analysis Inc. in Europe and North America designing efficient airline schedules and optimizing research portfolios. She joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty at the University of Washington in 2005. In addition, she holds a Visiting Professorship at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and a Research Affiliateship at Urban@UW (an initiative of the Office of Research and CoMotion at the University of Washington).

  • Adjunct Professor, Industrial & Systems Engineering, University of Washington
  • Visiting Professor, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg (Sweden)
  • Affiliate, Urban @ UW, University of Washington
  • Co-Chair, Aurora Urban Freight Consortium
  • Member, NECTAR (The Network on European Communications and Transport Activity Research) Cluster 3 Organizing Committee, Logistics and Freight
  • Member, Washington State Freight Advisory Committee (Chair, 2011-2013)
  • Organizing Committee, International Urban Freight Conference (I-NUF), Long Beach, CA (2017, 2019, 2021)
  • Associate Editor, Transportation Research Record (TRR) (2019-2020)
  • Member, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Transportation Research Board (TRB), Taskforce on Development of Freight Fluidity Performance Measures (2016-2019)
  • Group Chair, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Transportation Research Board (TRB), Freight Group (2016-2019)
  • Chair, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Transportation Research Board (TRB), Freight and Marine Chairs Group (2016-2018)
  • Chair, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Transportation Research Board (TRB) Standing Committee on Intermodal Freight Transportation (AT045) (2013-2016)
  • Member, National Academy of Sciences, Committee for Study of Freight Rail Transportation and Regulation (2014-2015)
  • Editor, International Journal of Logistics and Transportation Research (2013-2014)
  • Member, Puget Sound Regional Council Freight Advisory Panel (2008-2011)
Student Thesis and Dissertations

Examining the Effects of Common Carrier Lockers on Residential Delivery

 
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URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1773/47716
Publication Date: 2021
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. This thesis examines the effects of a common carrier locker placed in a residential building in downtown Seattle, Washington. An experimental design with on-street data tests the effect of the locker on dwell times and time that delivery people spend in the building. Data collected by the locker provider gives insight into the e-commerce behavior patterns of residents. Finally, a simulation model was constructed to obtain the optimal configuration of box sizes in similar lockers. The results show that the locker had a statistically significant effect on time spent within the building, but not on dwell times or curb productivity. However, dwell times for similar vehicles in this sample decreased somewhat. The simulation demonstrated that time-based policies and flexible locker designs can prove to be effective strategies for managing demand.

 

 

 

 

Authors: Caleb Diehl
Recommended Citation:
Diehl, Caleb. (2021). Examining the Effects of Common Carrier Lockers on Residential Delivery. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/47716. University of Washington Master's Thesis.
Technical Report

Characterizing Oregon’s Supply Chains

 
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URL: https://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/Programs/ResearchDocuments/CharacterizingOregonsSupply_SPR739.pdf
Publication: Oregon Dept. of Transportation, Research Section
Publication Date: 2013
Summary:

In many regions throughout the world, freight models are used to aid infrastructure investment and policy decisions. Since freight is such an integral part of efficient supply chains, more realistic transportation models can be of greater assistance. Transportation models in general have been moving away from the traditional four-step model into activity-based and supply chain-based models. Personal transportation models take into consideration household demographics and why families travel. Freight research has yet to fully identify the relationships between truck movements and company characteristics, so most freight models use the methodology of personal transportation models, despite situational differences.

In an effort to classify freight companies into groupings with differentiated travel movements, a survey of licensed motor carriers was designed and conducted in Oregon. The survey consisted of 33 questions. Respondents were asked about their vehicle fleets, locations served, times traveled, types of deliveries, and commodities. An analysis of the data revealed clusters of company types that can be distinguished by determining characteristics such as their role in a supply chain, facilities operated, commodity type, and vehicle types. An assessment of how the relationships found can be integrated into state models is also presented.

Authors: Dr. Anne Goodchild, Andrea Gagliano, Maura Rowell
Recommended Citation:
Goodchild, Anne. A. Gagiliano and M. Rowell. 2013. "Characterizing Oregon's Supply Chains." Final Report SPR 739. Oregon Department of Transportation: Research Section and Federal Highway Administration, Salem, OR.

Dr. Giacomo Dalla Chiara

Dr. Giacomo Dalla Chiara
Dr. Giacomo Dalla Chiara
  • Research Engineer, Urban Freight Lab
giacomod@uw.edu  |  206-685-0567  |  Wilson Ceramics Lab 111
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  • Urban transportation
  • Urban logistics
  • Operations research
  • Effectiveness of ebikes for last-mile delivery
  • Ph.D., Engineering Systems and Design, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) (2018)
    Dissertation: Commercial Vehicles Parking in Congested Urban Areas
  • M.S., Statistics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) (2012)
    Thesis: Factor Approach to Forecasting with High-Dimensional Data
  • B.S., Economics and Business, Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (LUISS) (2010)
    Thesis: A Monopolistic State in Competitive Markets

Dr. Giacomo Dalla Chiara is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Urban Freight Lab. Before moving to Seattle, he was postdoctoral research fellow at the Singapore University of Technology and Design in 2018 and visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017. He holds a PhD in Engineering Systems from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (Singapore), a MSc in Statistics from ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and a BSc in Economics from LUISS University (Italy).

His research focuses on statistical methods applied to urban mobility problems. His work involves developing models and simulations to study and develop new sustainable urban logistics practices.

  • Guest Editor, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice (Elsevier) (2021)
Paper

SimMobility Freight: An Agent-Based Urban Freight Simulator for Evaluating Logistics Solutions

URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tre.2020.102017
Publication: Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review
Volume: 141
Publication Date: 2020
Summary:

Despite significant advances in freight transport modeling in recent years, there is still lack of available tools for evaluating novel logistics solutions. We introduce the framework of SimMobility Freight, which is part of SimMobility, a multi-scale agent-based urban transportation simulation platform. SimMobility Freight is capable of simulating commodity contracts, logistics and vehicle operation planning and parking decisions in a fully-disaggregate manner. This allows us to evaluate alternative logistics solutions and measure their impacts. To illustrate its capability, we conduct an analysis of delivery time window regulations, assessing the policy impacts.

Authors: Dr. Giacomo Dalla Chiara, Takanori Sakai, André Romano Alho, B.K. Bhavathrathan, Raja Gopalakrish, Peiyu Jinge, Tetsuro Hyodo, Lynette Cheah, Moshe Ben-Akivae
Recommended Citation:
Sakai, T., Romano Alho, A., Bhavathrathan, B., Chiara, G. D., Gopalakrishnan, R., Jing, P., Hyodo, T., Cheah, L., & Ben-Akiva, M. (2020). SimMobility Freight: An Agent-Based Urban Freight Simulator for Evaluating Logistics Solutions. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 141, 102017. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tre.2020.102017