Modelling receiver logistics behaviour

Abstract

There is a need for collaborative urban freight planning and appropriate decision and planning support tools are lacking, resulting in inadequate understanding of how urban freight agents should collaborate and what benefits can be gained from their coalitions. This paper is therefore concerned with including receiver freight agents as autonomous agents into MATSim as a first step towards providing an appropriate decision support system to enable decision makers to determine how a balance between receiver restrictions and urban freight delivery cost can be achieved. The simulation with integrated receiver behaviour is applied to a small case as proof of concept. Results indicate that the newly included receiver agents changed their reordering behaviour autonomously whilst trying to reduce their own cost, confirming that the extended MATSim platform with integrated autonomous carrier and receiver agents demonstrates behavioural sensitivity in the tested scenarios.