Extension and Application of a General Pickup and Delivery Model for Evaluating the Impact of Bundling Goods in an Urban Environment

In this work we present results from a research project dealing with the bundling of goods, which was applied to the region of Zurich. The main goal was to develop a model for quantifying the impact of bundling goods on total costs. We focussed on the case of two distributors here and investigated two scenarios, namely no and full cooperation. The scenarios were based on transportation requests from customers and known origin-destination transport flows between postcodes. The costs include salaries, fleet degeneration and amortisation, respectively, and CO\(_2\) emissions. To allow for computing the total costs, a pickup and delivery model from literature was implemented and extended. It could be shown that even for a simple kind of cooperation, savings of around 7 % in total costs are possible.