An Agent-Based Simulation Tool for Modelling Sustainable Logistics Systems

Courier services form an important sector of urban freight traffic; leading to a daily volume of traffic that is problematic in economic and ecologic respects. New logistic concepts for reducing costs, distances and emissions could improve this situation by increased application of bicycle couriers and bundling of consignments. In this paper we summarise our previous work on the multi-agent-based simulation of alternative logistic concepts for city courier services. We discuss models of different organisation forms as well as the tools applied to their analysis. Since the logistic strategies analysed so far could not display the expected economic and ecologic benefits, a new concept named Fixed Exchange Points is presented that is closely related to actual work-sharing mechanisms of city couriers. We present a simulation model of this strategy and discuss first preliminary results.