United States-European Commission Urban Freight Twinning Initiative: Compendium of Project Summaries
Overview of Second Annual Urban Freight Roundtable at 2017 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting

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Research

United States

Interactive Simulation of Last-mile Distribution Network Design and Performance Using Tactile Visual Interfaces

The purpose of the project was to create a large-scale, interactive simulation model to assess the performance of a last-mile distribution network for online grocery deliveries. The research team used a tactile and visual user interface initially developed by the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which allows the user to design interactively an urban distribution infrastructure that would serve as a basis for a high-resolution simulation of distribution performance in terms of coverage area, cost of delivery, on-time delivery, and traffic and emission footprint. Model results are fed back to the user through the visual interface in close-to-real-time, creating a fast-paced environment for collaborative, cross-functional, and highly data-driven urban logistics decisionmaking for design and planning.

To depict urban complexities as accurately as possible, the model was designed to incorporate various sources of relevant (big) data such as: historic company order and delivery data, fleet GPS traces, and real-time traffic and travel distance data.

Tactile user interfaces enable researchers and decisionmakers to explore and analyze complex data and models intuitively.
Source: MIT Megacity Logistics Lab.

Project Type

Research

Period of Performance

February 2016 - January 2017

Project Site(s)

San Jose/San Francisco, California; and Denver, Colorado

Website

megacitylab.mit.edu

Contact

Matthias Winkenbach
Director
MIT Megacity Logistics Lab Center for Transportation & Logistics
(857) 253-1639
MWinkenb@mit.edu

Challenges Addressed

• Goods distribution
• Efficiency and responsiveness of last-mile distribution

Key Accomplishments

MIT produced a data-driven, high-performance simulation model of urban last-mile distribution performance to be used by Walmart.com in their network design and operational planning of online grocery distribution.

MIT combined methodological advances for the fast-paced, large-scale simulation of urban distribution networks with novel methods of visualizing model inputs and outputs, and making mathematical modeling intuitively accessible to decisionmakers and researchers through interactive visualization.

Stakeholder Involvement

Private-sector research partner: Walmart.com