Evaluating City Distribution Vehicle Limit Policy With Multi-Agent System

In order to reduce the negative effects, such as environmental pollution, traffic interference to urban area, brought by more and more city distribution vehicles, distribution vehicle limit policy has been implemented in many areas. However, the city delivery vehicle limit policy to some degrees is an obstacle to the development of urban distribution. Government departments realized the contradiction between the policy and the development of urban distribution, so they hope to take effective measures to build a convenient and smooth urban distribution system even now there is lacking of guidance on how to adjust the policy. Because of the complexity of urban distribution system, limit policy has different influence on the urban distribution stakeholders, which requires the government to consider interests for all stakeholders and properly balance the interests when making or adjust the policy.To from the perspective of stakeholders to evaluate urban distribution vehicle limit policy, this paper constructs the model of Multi-agent System(MAS) which use a more workable simulation method than traditional modeling tool. First this paper analyzes the interests and behaviors of stakeholders and identifies the shipper, the carrier, the consignee, the urban residents and the government as agents in MAS, then builds the model for vehicle routing problem and reinforce learning model to describe the behaviors and the interaction of the agents. Second, this paper assumes three situations and using the Swarm platform for simulation research. Three situations are the situation of free for limit policy, the situation of regional limit policy and the situation of road limit policy. Simulation results show that urban distribution vehicle limit policy has different influences to various stakeholders, and even the influences are conflicting. Regional limit policy, which is generally implemented now, has a good effect for environment control in the centre of city, but the negative externalities transfer to outside of the city area. Road limit policy which monitored of exhaust emission by the government and change limit road flexibly has a better effect than regional limit policy. Compare with the regional limit policy, it reduces the economic negative effects brought by limit policy and in the meanwhile improves the environment positive influence.