Ontology-based multi-agent system for urban freight transportation

Congestion, pollution, and safety are some of the most worrisome side-effects of the urban goods movement activities. These problems are generally attributed to the underlying characteristics of the domain such as heterogeneous stakeholders, their conflicting objectives and resulting distributed decision-making. Such autonomous decision-making stakeholders do not efficiently cooperate and coordinate while performing city logistics activities. The ensuing inefficient use of resources (e.g. goods delivery vehicle, time, etc.) gives rise to the above-mentioned problems. To reduce the negative externalities of urban goods movement, we first must understand the decision-making process of the city logistics stakeholder under different situations. Agent-based simulation modelling technique is such an approach where distributed decision-making of the multiple stakeholders can be included by modelling each entity as an autonomous agent. In this paper, we propose the use of a knowledge data model of urban freight domain - city logistics ontology - to develop an agent-based model. City logistics ontology is a knowledge model which includes city logistics entities (e.g. stakeholders, resources, etc.) and relationships between them in a structured form. The paper focuses on the usefulness of ontology in the development of agent-based model for city logistics domain, and attempts to demonstrate the effectiveness of agent technology in analysing the urban freight decision-making processes.