Assessment of Transport Value and Environmental Impact of Automotive Driving: A Physical-Action-Based Approach

This paper is concerned with the problem of assigning, in a physically transparent way, value to automotive transport services and their related environmental impacts. We discuss the idea that the transport value of an automotive service can be measured in units of physical action, i.e., in terms of the physical entity that measures the effect of work performed within a specified physical process. It is further argued that from this action-based transport value, two dimensionless figures of merit (FOM), TV and ETV, can be derived, which can be used as cost factors in algorithms designed to optimize transport services and logistic networks.