An assessment of carbon emission reductions from improving the degree of vehicle utilization

The emission of greenhouse gases is one of the negative side effects of road freight transportation. One way to reduce this negative impact is by using existing vehicle capacity more efficiently: An increase in the degree of vehicle utilization can cause a reduction in the number of kilometers driven for given transport hauls, which could reduce carbon emissions. In this presentation, we consider the increase in vehicle utilization that can be achieved if we add a return load to a vehicle that makes deliveries from a depot to a set of customers, for example, by picking up recyclable materials on the way. To that end, we discuss the following two topics:
1)      We evaluate tools to compute the carbon emissions of vehicles with different loads and discuss some of the challenges with their usage. The question is what type of carbon computation tools are suitable in operations research studies in inventory and routing models.
2)      We perform an assessment of the carbon emission savings that can be achieved when a logistics provider can combine outbound deliveries as well as pickup orders from supply locations on the same vehicles. The question is under which conditions this leads to the largest (smallest) benefits in terms of carbon emissions.

Registration to Remy Spliet, spliet@ese.eur.nl is required for availability of lunch.