Model of Urban Freight Transportation: The Case of Waste Collection

This thesis introduces the role of urban freight transportation in global economies and its negative environmental impacts. Because the volume of urban freight is continually increasing sustainable measurements have to be implemented during all phases of transportation planning and operation processes. The thesis is mainly focused on waste collection, as it is an often neglected part of urban freight transportation. Since urban areas are growing the waste collection is starting to be complex problem which is difficult to manage. Therefore different types of optimization software are used to improve the whole process. In this thesis TransCAD software is used to perform an arc routing optimization in the north part of El Paso, Texas, U.S. The results are compared with current waste collection route used by the City of El Paso to see if TransCAD is a suitable software for routing optimization