Forecasting parcel deliveries in an urban freight simulator for the province of Zuid Holland

1. Overview and motivation E-commerce is a rapidly developing segment within urban goods transportation. While currently making up only 5.5% of all kilometers driven by vans in the Netherlands (CBS, 2018), this segment is experiencing rapid growth. For example, in the Netherlands, the volume of parcel deliveries grew by 20% in 2018 (ACM, 2018). This growth is further accelerated by the current coronavirus pandemic. The increasing importance of this segment is not reflected yet in strategic models used in practice for transportation demand forecasting. Parcel deliveries are not modelled explicitly, which does not only prevent the model users from calculating effects of scenarios and policies related to e-commerce, but it also disregards the unique nature of this segment (e.g. specific depot locations, strong growth rates) and, therefore, leads to flawed reference forecasts of van traffic. In the scientific literature there are some first examples of simulation models for parcel deliveries (Sakai et al, 2020; Hörl & Puchinger, 2021; Llorca & Moeckel, 2021; Mommens et al., 2021; Reiffer et al., 2021). However, each of these examples lacks an empirical disaggregate demand model, focusses on one (part of a) city rather than a whole region, or focusses on one product/service segment rather than all parcel deliveries in a region. Moreover, little experience is gathered in applying such urban freight simulators for traffic forecasting. 2. Methodology, results and main contributions To combat these shortcomings of the state-of-practice freight models, we developed a module for last-mile parcel deliveries and used it to explore the impacts of different scenario assumptions regarding parcel demand and scheduling. The module consists of two sub-modules: the parcel demand sub-module and the parcel scheduling sub-module. The parcel demand sub-module calculates parcel demand based on the households and businesses in each zone. For parcels to hou
Transport and Planning