Fuel price changes and their impacts on urban transport – a literature review using bibliometric and content analysis techniques, 1972–2017

ABSTRACT

While the period of heightened oil prices in 2005–2014 has attracted considerable academic and policy attention, there is scant cross-disciplinary research considering energy price, transport and land use together. In car dependent societies many socio-economically disadvantaged areas often lack public and active transport accessibility. Emerging research focus has been placed on issues of transport equity including effects of fuel prices. We reviewed 45 years (1972–2017) of publications about fuel price impacts, transport, and urban context, drawn from Web of Science listed publications. Bibliographic citation analysis reveals eight major research clusters with a set of inter-city comparative studies at their centre. The historical evolution, geographical trends, research approaches and the key themes are revealed by context analysis. The paper highlights the need for further studies looking at energy, transport and land use interaction, and suggests a greater focus on transport equity.     

A warehouse location-routing problem

The interdependence between distribution center location and vehicle routing has been recognized by both academics and practitioners. However, only few attempts have been made to incorporate routing in location analysis. This paper defines the Warehouse Location-Routing Problem (WLRP) as one of simultaneously solving the DC location and vehicle routing problems. We present a mixed integer programming formulation of the WLRP. Based on this formulation, it can be seen that the WLRP is a generalization of well-known and difficult location and routing problems, such as the Location-Allocation Problem and the Multi-depot Vehicle Dispatch Problem. It is therefore a large and complex problem which cannot be solved using existing mixed-integer programming techniques. We present a heuristic solution method for the WLRP, based on decomposing the problem into three subproblems. The proposed method solves the subproblems in a sequential manner while accounting for the dependence between them. We discuss a large-scale application of the proposed method to a national distribution company at a regional level.