OTREC-RR-12-10

Increased urban congestion during peak periods increases logistics costs. In addition, environmental, social, and political pressures to limit the impacts associated with CO2 emissions are mounting rapidly. A key challenge for transportation agencies and businesses is to improve the efficiency of urban freight and commercial vehicle movements while ensuring environmental quality, livable communities, and economic growth. Efforts to analyze and quantify the impacts of congestion and freight public policies on carriers operations and CO2 emissions are hindered by the complexities of vehicle routing problems with time-dependent travel times and the lack of congestion data. This research focuses on the analysis of costs and CO2 emissions for different levels of congestion and time-definitive demands. We use travel time data from an archive of sensors, time-dependent routing algorithms, and problems-instances with different binding constraints to analyze the impacts of congestion on commercial vehicle emissions.