Developing a mesoscopic simulation model for examination of freight traffic of shopping malls in Budapest

Abstract

Within the city freight transport the supply of shopping malls is a significant challenge. In Budapest there was no project to treat the logistics of the malls as a system. In the capital of Hungary there are 18 shopping malls, which are big city logistics junctions and now there is no possibility of a consolidated system to supply them. Budapest is the biggest city of Hungary; which area is 525,2 km2 and the population is 1.750.000. In this city (in 2015) there were 32405 retailers, and more than 3000 of them were in shopping malls. This means, that more than the 10% of retailers of the city are concentrated in these 18 junctions. We started our project in 2015 to deal with the logistics characteristics of the malls on Budapest and we developed a methodology, which is suitable to examine the freight transports and the city logistics parameters of the malls. With our methodology we measured 3 shopping mall and more, than 300 shop of them. After this we prepared our mesoscopic simulation model, which helps us to examine the goods supply of the malls. This model is suitable to show us, which advantages it can have, when we organize the supplies of the malls in consolidated city logistics system.