Evaluating the Efficiency of Urban Activity Chains

Many city logistic initiatives are large in scale and aim to improve the efficiency and overall state of goods movement within our urban areas. Unfortunately the implementation and day-to-day operations of urban goods movement is less than optimal. Commercial vehicles have many activities in their activity chains, from when they start at a terminal depot, until they return. Some vehicles have as many as hundreds of activities in a single chain. Unfortunately many consecutive activities in a vehicle's chain occur at the same facility, suggesting that vehicles have to maneuver and relocate a few times before their true, economically useful function is completed. In this study we consider such duplicate activities and perform temporal and spatial analyses to better understand the nature of these productivity sinks.