The focus of the work was on trying to understand the last mile of freight delivery. Freight is something I've often excluded from my research into road usage and traffic because the data is usually proprietary. I primarily work with open data, so it has proved difficult to gain access to this kind of information for my own analysis. Unfortunately for me, while freight vehicles represent only a small percentage of vehicles on the road, their characteristic driving patterns mean that they have a disproportionate impact on congestion, emissions, and road safety.
Through the partnerships FTC 2050 had developed, I had access to a wealth of data which had been collected by team members and shared by our project partnerships. Being able to combine this kind of information with agent-based modelling techniques was a great opportunity, and I'm so grateful to the project team members and partners for making it possible!
The rest of the team did a bunch of great analysis of the data, while I developed a simulation framework to track the effectiveness of different delivery strategies together with Kostas Cheliotis. We were able to incorporate their findings into the behavioural framework of the drivers, which is something we'll hopefully be publishing soon.
In the interim, we've finally made our simulation framework public on GitHub. There's a short wiki, which we intend to develop further.
This work ended up garnering quite a bit of interest; we were interviewed for an article in the New Scientist (behind a paywall here) and later for BBC Radio 4 (both live on the radio program You & Yours and in a longer segment on the podcast Smart Consumer - please enjoy my now weirdly trans-Atlantic accent!).
The project was a great experience and I'm sad to see it come to an end. We've got some follow-on funding to bring the simulation to festivals throughout the UK, so if you pass by the Science Tent at a big festival, keep an eye out for FTC 2050 work!
In the meantime, my thanks to the project members: Tom Cherrett and Fraser McLeod of the University of Southampton; Tolga Bektas, now of the University of Liverpool; Maja Piecyk, Julian Allen, and Marzena Piotrowska of the University of Westminster; Adrian Friday, Oliver Bates, and Carolynne Lord of lovely Lancaster University; and of course Kostas Cheliotis, formerly of CASA but now happily repatriated!
