Sustainable freight - traffic modelling, commercial vehicle routing, traffic signal optimisation

The sustainability of freight movement is becoming a critical issue in the delivery of freight and logistic services, as well as impacting on road network capacity. Given this, there is a need to align these issues together to determine the practicability of a sustainable freight movement management tool linked with urban and interurban traffic control. In the context of traffic management, and transport planning, there are traffic data and road network modeling components that can be utilised to help deliver such a tool. In the realm of freight vehicle routing and scheduling there are tools for programming logistic operations for freight movement. In the freight vehicle cab on-board units can be deployed that can communicate with freight management centres to provide real-time updates of freight routing and scheduling operations while the driver is in the field working and servicing delivery routes. The combining these technologies can deliver to the logistics distribution industry a service tool that can be utilised for optimum route planning. CVRS, real-time freight routing and scheduling technology is currently technically possible subject to the appropriate data feeds and data dissemination capabilities. In the UK this project and system will be based around MATTISSE which provides regional traffic control in the English Midlands of the UK. Traffic data would be both collected and disseminated by the MATISSE capabilities.