RESEARCH ARTICLE


Determining the Shape of Delivery Zones to Balance Local and Line Haul Costs



Bruce X. Wang*
Zachry Department of Civil Engineering, Dwight Look College of Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA


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Creative Commons License
© 2009 Bruce X. Wang;

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering, Dwight Look College of Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA; Tel: 979-845-9901; E-mails: bwang@tamu.edu, bwang@civil.tamu.edu


Abstract

This note follows an early work by Newell and Daganzo which suggests a wedge-like zone to divide a service area for freight delivery. Current literature has been largely using the zone of a fixed shape determined solely by demand density. We find that, given the same demand density, the shape of zones could vary significantly in order to better balance local and line haul truck delivery costs which include environmental externalities. A way to determine the optimal shape of truck delivery zones is presented.

Keywords: Freight distribution, continuous approximation, delivery zone, multiple vehicle routing problem.