Indicators to evaluate sustainable freight transportation strategy: case study on gps installation to freight vehicle

Abstract

Installation of Global Positioning System (GPS) technology on freight vehicles is a significant strategy that paves the way for sustainability in freight transportation. Hence, evaluating the outcomes of the above-mentioned strategy using appropriate indicators is paramount important. Even though fuel cost and carbon emission have been used as indicators to evaluate sustainability in freight transportation, they fail to produce meaningful comparative evaluation along with vehicle categories. The purpose of this study is to propose ‘fuel cost per vehicle’ and ‘carbon emission per vehicle’ as the indicators for evaluating sustainable freight transportation using Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT). Secondary data on the total carbon emission of all the vehicles irrespective of GPS installed or not, VMT for both GPS installed, and GPS non-installed vehicles were collected. Methods have been proposed to define the proposed indicators using the collected data. The proposed indicators reveal that the per vehicle carbon emission and per vehicle fuel cost are lower for GPS installed vehicles over GPS non installed vehicles (6,987.64Kg versus 17,791.35Kg, LKR269,432.59 versus LKR686,008.02). The findings align with existing scholarly work and industrial application on GPS installation of freight vehicles. This research contributes to performance evaluation of sustainable freight transportation.