Open Access
Using modelling techniques to analyze urban freight distribution. A case study in Pamplona (Spain)
(Elsevier, 2018) Alvarez Indave, Pablo; Serrano Hernández, Adrián; Faulín Fajardo, Javier; Juan Pérez, Ángel Alejandro; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC
The city of Pamplona, in Spain, is currently experiencing several changes regarding sustainable mobility such as pedestrianization of some streets in the city center, and access control to the Old Town for motor vehicles through the use of automatic number-plate recognition. However, some groups including local neighbors and businesses are raising complaints as they are being affected by these measures. This is also the case for couriers and logistics companies which have now to comply with new regulations regarding delivery routes throughout the Old Town. This paper will present a comprehensive study of the situation that is being carried out, and in which social perceptions and freight traffic patterns in the Old Town of Pamplona are analyzed to understand how urban freight distribution could be improved in the area. For this purpose, we make use of a survey-based research to the stakeholders, i.e. pedestrians, logistics companies, retailers, and authorities of Pamplona. Results highlight pollution derived from transportation, lack of parking spaces as well as invasion of public spaces in the city center as the key issues for improving freight transportation in the Old Town. Finally, placing a distribution center in the Old Town and the promotion of the cycle-logistics are considered as the future of the urban distribution in Pamplona.
Open Access
Exploring crowdshippers' behavior and preferences: intertwining urban distribution and people mobility
(Elsevier, 2025-05-14) García Herrera, Alisson Maurinne; Serrano Hernández, Adrián; Faulín Fajardo, Javier; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Gobierno de Navarra / Nafarroako Gobernua
Collaborative economy companies in the transport field have been a disruptive force in the urban mobility landscape around the world during the last decade 2010-2020. Crowdshipping has emerged as a collaborative economy option promoting improved utilization of currently underutilized transportation capacity, thereby reducing transportation costs and emissions. This article aims to analyze and synthesize existing research on the impact of the crowdshipper (individuals responsible for collecting and delivering the product) behavior on the system and the factors that drive his or her willingness to participate, to identify best practices and opportunities to enhance business analytics, decision-making, and model efficiency in this emerging area.
Open Access
Managing transportation externalities in the Pyrenees region: measuring the willingness-to-pay for road freight noise reduction using an experimental auction mechanism
(Elsevier, 2018) Denant-Boemont, Laurent; Faulín Fajardo, Javier; Hammiche, Sabrina; Serrano Hernández, Adrián; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas
The estimation of the noise impact caused by road freight transportation is critical to have acknowledgment of the ambiance pollution caused by road traffic crossing geographical areas containing important natural resources. Thus, our work proposes a within-subject survey where a Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) is combined with a laboratory economic experimental auction. Our study objective is to measure the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for reducing traffic noise nuisances due to freight transportation in the region of Navarre, Spain. A special focus is made regarding the measurement of the hypothetical bias, when a comparison is done between hypothetical WTP, coming from the CVM study, with real-incentivized one, as the outcome of the economic experiment. Additionally, statistical analyses are conducted in order to find explanation factors for these outcomes. Results suggest a strong evidence for an upward hypothetical bias (from 50% to 160%) indicating the income, the educational level, the gender, and the age as the main factors which explain that bias.
Open Access
Topology effects in drone parcel delivery
(Cal-Tek srl, 2024) Izco Berastegui, Irene; Serrano Hernández, Adrián; Faulín Fajardo, Javier; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa, PJUPNA26-2022
Despite the positive sustainability prospects of drones, their flight range is compromised due to their limited battery capacity and the payload of delivered parcels. An alternative to address this challenge is the placement of charging stations where drone batteries are recharged to expand their flying range. The aim of this work is determining the number and location of drone charging stations for topology-dependent scenarios: rural areas and densely populated urban areas. To the best of the researchers' knowledge, there is currently no existing study in the literature that specifically investigates the impacts of topology on drone-assisted delivery. This study focuses on designing drone assignment strategies through optimization-simulation, aiming at minimizing charging station installation costs and operational costs and as a novelty, drone battery consumption is considered in the model design. Drone delivery order instances with different sizes and spatial distributions are generated to simulate realistic scenarios of demand and evaluate the optimization model to allocate the customer demands to stations and dimensioning drones fleet. Results show that considering parcel weight and flight distance has a significant impact on the performance of drone allocation to stations and highlight the effects of topology in the implementation of a drone-assisted delivery network.
Open Access
Locating a biorefinery in Northern Spain: decision making and economic consequences
(Elsevier, 2019) Serrano Hernández, Adrián; Faulín Fajardo, Javier; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Gobierno de Navarra / Nafarroako Gobernua, IIM14196.RI1
Biofuels are emerging as a prominent renewable and sustainable energy sources in developed countries. In this sense, this paper presents a case study in which a biorefinery has to be sited in Northern Spain. Thus, the strategic decision of locating such a facility is deeply investigated through strategic policy evaluation. Then, tactical decisions ranging from purchasing and transportation policies to storage protocols are carried out. Only local and limited biomass can be harvested for supplying the biorefinery through a heterogeneous vehicle fleet. Moreover two different and mutually exclusive storage strategies are evaluated: direct supply from crops to biorefinery and using intermediate-collectors. Additionally, crop exploitation factors and biorefinery sizes are used to generate several scenarios in which the strategic decision of location as well as all the tactic decisions are made. Some mixed integer linear programming models are proposed to figure out all relevant decision problems. The results suggest that the Northwest study area as the best option to locate the biorefinery and recommend the intermediate-collector storage strategy. Moreover, the key information about critical biomass, crops and times are also provided.
Open Access
Horizontal collaboration in freight transport: concepts, benefits and environmental challenges
(Institut d'Estadística de Catalunya, 2017) Serrano Hernández, Adrián; Juan Pérez, Ángel Alejandro; Faulín Fajardo, Javier; Pérez Bernabeu, Elena; Estatistika eta Ikerketa Operatiboa; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Estadística e Investigación Operativa
Since its appearance in the 1990s, horizontal collaboration (HC) practices have revealed them-selves as catalyzers for optimizing the distribution of goods in freight transport logistics. After introducing the main concepts related to HC, this paper offers a literature review on the topic and provides a classification of best practices in HC. Then, the paper analyses the main benefits and optimization challenges associated with the use of HC at the strategic, tactical, and operational levels. Emerging trends such as the concept of ‘green’ or environmentally-friendly HC in freighttransport logistics are also introduced. Finally, the paper discusses the need of using hybrid optimization methods, such as simheuristics and learnheuristics, in solving some of the previously identified challenges in real-life scenarios dominated by uncertainty and dynamic conditions.
Open Access
Is time more important than distance to optimize freight delivery routes? An approach using the value of time
(Elsevier, 2024-02-23) Alvarez Indave, Pablo; Serrano Hernández, Adrián; Lerga Valencia, Iosu; Faulín Fajardo, Javier; Estadística, Informática y Matemáticas; Estatistika, Informatika eta Matematika; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa, PJUPNA26-2022
Traditional approaches to optimize freight delivery routes are based on minimizing a distance-based cost function. New approaches use also time as the objective function to minimize. However, the trade-off between time and distance is sometimes unclear. This paper presents a new approach to optimize delivery routes in which both time and distance are used together to optimize delivery routes. For this purpose, the operating cost of a vehicle and the value of time have been used to convert time and distance into monetary units. Through the study of three different networks in Spain with different level of detail (the region of Catalonia, the city of Barcelona, and the old part of Pamplona), the results have indicated that minimizing both time and distance provides better results than the traditional approach, especially at a local level where congestion effects are more relevant.
Open Access
Internalizing negative externalities in vehicle routing problems through green taxes and green tolls
(Institut d'Estadística de Catalunya (Idescat), 2019) Serrano Hernández, Adrián; Faulín Fajardo, Javier; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC
Road freight transportation includes various internal and external costs that need to be accounted for in the construction of efficient routing plans. Typically, the resulting optimization problem is formulated as a vehicle routing problem in any of its variants. While the traditional focus of the vehicle routing problem was the minimization of internal routing costs such as travel distance or duration, numerous approaches to include external factors related to environmental routing aspects have been recently discussed in the literature. However, internal and external routing costs are often treated as competing objectives. This paper discusses the internalization of external routing costs through the consideration of green taxes and green tolls. Numeric experiments with a biased-randomization savings algorithm, show benefits of combining internal and external costs in delivery route planning.
Open Access
Urban e-grocery distribution design in Pamplona (Spain) applying an agent-based simulation model with horizontal cooperation scenarios
(MDPI, 2021) Serrano Hernández, Adrián; Torre Martínez, Rocío de la; Cadarso, Luis; Faulín Fajardo, Javier; Institute of Smart Cities - ISC; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE
E-commerce has boosted in the last decades because of the achievements of the information and telecommunications technology along with the changes in the society life-style. More recently, the groceries online purchase (or e-grocery), has also prevailed as a way of making the weekly shopping, particularly, the one including fresh vegetables and fruit. Furthermore, this type of virtual shopping in supermarkets is gaining importance as the most efficient delivery system in cost and time. Thus, we have evaluated in this study the influence of the cooperation-based policies on costs and service quality among different supermarkets in Pamplona, Spain. Concerning methodology, first of all, we carried out a survey in Pamplona having the purpose of modelling the demand patterns about e-grocery. Second, we have developed an agent-based simulation model for generating scenarios in non-cooperative, limited cooperation, and full cooperation settings, considering the real data obtained from the survey analysis. At this manner, Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) and Multi Depot VRPs (MDVRP) are dynamically generated and solved within the simulation framework using a biased-randomization algorithm. Finally, the results show significant reductions in distance driven and lead times when employing horizontal cooperation in e-grocery distribution.
Open Access
Determining an optimal area to locate a biorefinery under economic and environmental criteria
(Elsevier BV, 2017) Serrano Hernández, Adrián; Faulín Fajardo, Javier; Pintor Borobia, Jesús María; Belloso Ezcurra, Javier; Institute for Advanced Materials and Mathematics - INAMAT2
Facilities location is a strategic decision which has to be carefully considered because it could involve the failure or success of a business. For that reason, anything that helps decision makers to facilitate their location decision processes is of their utmost interest. The aim of this paper is, therefore, providing a methodology that could be useful for the decision makers by giving them not only an optimal point but also a whole region where they can focus on their attention. Knowing that biofuels are settling as a new alternative energy source which has been spreading around the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and oil dependence, this methodology is tested in the real case of locating a biorefinery in Navarre, Spain. Moreover, A Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model has been developed to generate optimal region vertices as well as some other supply chain characteristics, including, among others, which crops are going to be harvested, when they are going to be collected, and their storage levels. Additionally, two criteria were implemented in MILP model to create two optimal regions: one considering an economic criterion and other one minimizing environmental impact. As a result, two regions were drawn in the Navarrese territory that point out where a biorefinery should be located and how the supply chain should be designed.