Smartporter: A Combined Perishable Food and People Transport Architecture in Smart Urban Areas

摘要

The current bulk transit systems (e.g., buses) and local perishable food distribution logistics, both suffer from significant fuel inefficiency along with food wastage due to quality degradation in the distribution pipeline. In this paper we present a mechanism that exploits automated electric vehicles (AEVs) in future smart cities and regions to provide both people transport and fresh food distribution that minimizes empty miles of the vehicles (and thus enhances transport efficiency) while meeting the constraints on passenger transit time and food freshness. We devise an optimization framework and show how it can be solved using genetic algorithms in order to handle dynamic demands for passenger transport/products, uncertain supply delays, and variations in product availability. Performance evaluations with extensive simulations show that flexibly deciding the AEV routes improves the transportation efficiency by ~24-78% whereas improves the delivery quality by ~2 times compared to the typical fixed routes/schedules used both by regular passenger bus services and by local distribution operations.