Assessing the value of information for retail distribution of perishable goods

This paper addresses quantitative methods for estimating the value of information from ITS in urban freight distribution. A real-life application on the retail distribution of perishable goods is considered. The problem is formulated as a vehicle routing problem with soft time windows and time-dependent travel times, and solved by using information affected by different degrees of detail and reliability. The practical performance of these solutions is then evaluated by simulation, to assess the joint benefit of using more reliable and detailed information with different solution algorithms.