A simulation-based approach to assess impacts of urban logistics policies on traffic flow dynamics

International audienceIn urban environments, there are now many challenging problems concerning freight transport.As cities around the world grow rapidly, there is an increase in pickup-delivery truck traffic inurban areas. It turns out that commercial traffic is now a major source of externalities in metroareas, including congestion, noise, air pollution (small particulates, NOx, greenhouse gasemissions), and traffic incidents [1].To overcome these issues, many interesting and innovative strategies have been developed inEurope and other parts of the world. Especially, some researchers proposed the idea of citylogistics to solve these difficult problems [2-3]. The idea of this concept is to rationalize thefreight activities in cities by optimizing operations considering the traffic conditions and thecongestion issues. Consequently, public authorities strongly need decision support frameworksto evaluate urban logistics planning and management.It turns out that a key point in predicting the impacts of city logistics is the influence of freighton traffic flow dynamics. Particularly, pickup-delivery trucks maneuvers generate roadcapacity reduction and lead to delay for individual drivers. Although this is a crucial topic, theliterature rarely addresses this issue. This paper aims to fill this lack of understanding byincorporating the effects of urban freight in a traffic flow model