Modelling Freight Delivery Flows: Missing Link of Urban Transport Analysis

Urban freight transport has barely incited any modeling efforts when compared to passenger cars and public transport, which is mainly due to the lack of available data and the complexity of the delivery route patterns and the involved decision making. We present here a modeling approach consisting of a demand model followed by an entropy maximization procedure to estimate an origin-destination matrix for urban freight transport vehicles, both for business to business and home deliveries, during the morning peak hour. This approach requires relatively few data inputs in comparison with other existing models and represents an initial step toward the inclusion of freight delivery models in overall urban transport planning. The application of the model is illustrated with a case study in the city of Seville, with its efficiency tested by the validation of the results using actual traffic counts.