Phd in INFRASTRUCTURES AND TRANSPORT

Thesis title: Accessibility Analysis of Urban Freight Distribution with Electric Vehicles incorporating E-VRP

The growing rate of urban freight distribution that has been steadily increasing in the last decades, has further risen during the pandemic period due to the population’s mobility restrictions. The use of electric fleets for a more sustainable urban distribution is nowadays a considerable opportunity, but introduces new challenges and problems, such as the decrease of vehicles’ driving range and the significantly time-consuming refuelling operations. These limitations increase the levels of complexity of freight systems, already burdened with their own problematics, such as the need of optimizing tours and the interaction between the many stakeholders (customers, decision makers, drivers). This manuscript proposes an innovative approach to evaluate freight systems and to support the design of a distribution system based on electric vehicles by means of an accessibility analysis. An EVRP solving procedure is used to gain insight from the relationship between the numerous variables that define distribution tours, profiting from the existing literature on continuous approximation models for freight distribution. Two different accessibility formulations specific for freight transport are presented and tested on the study case regarding the Metropolitan City of Rome, with the aim to determine the convenience for each zone to host an urban logistic centre to deliver to a given set of customers distributed over the territory. Results show that accessibility theory can be profitably applied to freight systems, yielding accessibility measures that are not only theoretically consistent, but also match a realistic measure such as the average cost of a tour.