The sharp increase of e-commerce over the last few years has led to an augmentation in the volume of trucks both in ports and in commercial areas. Truck traffic has a negative impact on traffic flow in general, due to the size of trucks and their slower dynamics. The continuously increasing use of navigation apps has led drivers to make their routing decisions in an independent manner in an effort to minimize their own individual travel time, with possible significant deviation from a socially optimum solution.

Abstract: The purpose of this research is to develop optimization and control techniques and integrate them with real-time simulation models to achieve load balancing in complex networks.  Our application case is the regional freight system.  Freight moves on rail and road networks which are also shared by passengers.  These networks today work independently, even though they are highly interdependent, and the result is inefficiencies in the form of congestion, pollution, and excess fuel consumption.  These inefficiencies are obse