As a postdoctoral research fellow at the AMS Institute and TU Delft, Nadia works on “Circular Logistics in Amsterdam”. More precisely, she is investigating a wide range of decisions to be made for moving freight transport from roadways to waterways.
Congested roads, the bad status of quay walls, environmental zones, and restricted time windows are great incentives for the municipality of Amsterdam to stimulate transportation over water. However, such a modal shift is not straightforward. There are a number of barriers, including limited waterway capacity, lack of transshipment points, high operational costs, the initial investments, and lack of mass demand, to be handled for such a shift.
Nadia investigates optimizing different logistic decisions raised by moving a part of freight transport from roadways to waterways. The problem embraces a wide range of sub-problems, including creating incentives in stakeholders for such a modal shift, infrastructure-related decisions such as establishing transshipment points and identifying canal navigation profiles based on the status of canal bed and quay walls, fleet management, and two-echelon routing including waterway and last-mile delivery via road. Moreover, she is developing a digital twin enabling the planner to investigate the impact of varying decision scenarios that works based on agent-based simulation and reinforcement learning.
“The ever-increasing urban population of Amsterdam highlights the necessity for efficient freight transport in the city. A modal shift to waterways can be seen as a promising solution in this regard.””
Nadia Pourmohammadzia
Former Research Fellow at AMS Institute
