| Bangui is the capital city of Central African Republic,and the city has grown massively over the last ten years,which has led to a number of logistical challenges in the city centre,particularly in the central business district.As in all cases,managing a system becomes difficult as the number of its components increases,and it becomes even more difficult and costly for the government to monitor compliance.This is evidenced by the increase in accidents,the opening of stations in undesignated locations,congestion in central business districts,and non-compliance with other regulations such as taxes,overloaded vehicles and speeding.Furthermore,it confirms the complexity that comes with urban logistics.Transportation plays a very important role in an economy,in order to perform any economic activity transportation is a connecting link.The mobility(speed and safety)of the society will determine how productive the society is,therefore,proactive management of both public and freight transportation is very important in any economy.Research has shown that urban mobility improves economic and social well-being of cities but mobility comes at a cost congestion.The current research employed a quantitative research design because it is aimed at building a mathematical model.The three-echelon vehicle routing problem with time windows was used to solve the freight distribution problem in Bangui City.two methods were used namely three echelon VRP and a simulation model in order to assess the feasibility of developing a logistics coordination mechanism for the city of Bangui.Consequently,seven experiments were conducted with the three echelons VRP model with the objective function of minimizing total cost.The lowest objective function value was observed in the fourth numerical experiment,which used 12 vehicles routes to serve all the three echelons of the model.The simulation model on the other hand produced significant results;the average time taken by the vehicles to make deliveries to 50 customers was about 1.8 hours instead of the several hours observed currently.The average speed for the simulation model was set at 10m/s.Therefore,improving the speed can even yield better results.Cities have continued to attract high population concentrations and this has put pressure on most authorities in trying to combat the challenges which come with increased populations.Among the challenges faced in both developed and developing countries is traffic congestion and pollution in city cores without interrupting service offerings. |
