Decentralized urban freight management through market based mechanisms

Freight trucks provide an essential service to industrialized societies by transporting foods, raw materials and finished goods over land, typically to and from manufacturing plants, retail and distribution centers. It constitutes a major enabling factor for most economic and social activities taking place in urban areas. Although freight transportation is a major source of good distribution in the city yet most of the big cities don´t have adequate techniques to deal with the resulting congestion and traffic management problem. Some cities do not allow freight trucks to enter the city during the day times causing substantial social and economical losses whereas some cities with no limit on freight trucks during day times cause huge congestion on city streets due to lack of proper management approaches. This paper proposes an iterative bidding framework for better traffic management and socioeconomic benefit while dealing with the decentralized urban freight management problem. It has several advantages for freight transport access management in cities that require implementing periodic access limits on certain city highway entrances. The uniqueness of the proposed approach is that it integrates the exploration of freight truck´s access deadline flexibility and support city´s entrance access limit restriction decisions within an iterative bidding framework, which has the potential to coordinate the behaviors of self-interested parties in decentralized supply chain environments.