Synchronizing vans and cargo bikes in a city distribution network

One of the significant side-effects of growing urbanization is the constantly increasing amount of freight transportation in cities. This is mainly performed by conventional vans and trucks and causes a variety of problems such as road congestion, noise nuisance and pollution. Yet delivering goods to residents is a necessity. Sustainable concepts of city distribution networks are one way of mitigating difficulties of freight services. In this paper we develop a two-echelon city distribution scheme with temporal and spatial synchronization between cargo bikes and vans. The resulting heuristic is based on a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure with path relinking. In our computational experiments we use artificial data as well as real-world data of the city of Vienna. Furthermore we compare three distribution policies. The results show the costs caused by temporal synchronization and can give companies decision-support in planning a sustainable city distribution concept.