City logistics aims to reduce the nuisances associated to freight transportation in urban areas while supporting their economic and social development. The fundamental idea is to view individual stakeholders and decisions as components of an integrated logistics system. This implies the coordination of shippers, carriers, and movements as well as the consolidation of loads of several customers and carriers into the same environment-friendly vehicles. City logistics explicitly aims to optimize such advanced urban transportation systems. We focus on a challenging city logistics planning issue, the integrated short-term scheduling of operations and management of resources, for the general case involving a two-tiered distribution structure. We investigate the main issues related to the problem, introduce a new problem class, propose both a general model and formulations for the main system components, and identify promising solution avenues.

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Models for Evaluating and Planning City Logistics Systems

Today, around 54% of the world’s population lives in urban areas. By 2050, this share is expected to go up significantly. As a result, city logistics, which focuses on the efficient and effective transportation of goods in urban areas while taking into account the negative effects on congestion, safety, and environment, is critical to ensuring continued quality of life in cities. We review and discuss a variety of current and anticipated challenges and opportunities of city logistics. We hope this helps shaping an appropriate research agenda and stimulates more researchers to enter this exciting field.

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50th Anniversary Invited Article—City Logistics: Challenges and Opportunities

While it is certainly too early to make a definitive assessment of the effectiveness of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), it is not to take stock of what has been achieved and to think about what could be achieved in the near future. In our opinion, ITS developments have been up to now largely hardware-driven and have led to the introduction of many sophisticated technologies in the transportation arena, while the development of the software component of ITS, models and decision-support systems in particular, is lagging behind. To reach the full potential of ITS, one must thus address the challenge of making the most intelligent usage possible of the hardware that is being deployed and the huge wealth of data it provides. We believe that transportation planning and management disciplines, operations research in particular, have a key role to play with respect to this challenge. The paper focuses on Freight ITS: Commercial Vehicle Operations and Advanced Fleet Management Systems, City Logistics, and electronic business. The paper reviews main issues, technological challenges, and achievements, and illustrates how the introduction of better operations research-based decision-support software could very significantly improve the ultimate performance of Freight ITS.

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Intelligent Freight Transportation Systems : Assessment and the Contribution of Operations Research

Vehicle routing problems for city logistics

Objectives, Methods and Results of Surveys Carried out in the Field of Urban Freight Transport: An International Comparison

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01078143/document

Reducing Social and Environmental Impacts of Urban Freight Transport: A Review of Some Major Cities

A methodology for the evaluation of urban logistics innovations

Commonly collected data about urban freight does not provide appropriate input to urban freight transport policy-oriented models. According to us, a policy-oriented model (Ambrosini et al., 2008) is a data-adjusted model, oriented towards operational policy analysis. The aim is to simulate freight distribution within urban areas for evaluation, control and design of the urban freight transport system. Policy-oriented models help public decision making about the main stakes associated with an urban sustainable development. These models have to simulate the present situation properly enough to provide a good quality forecast to satisfy both local urban and global environmental issues. Data collected in order to calibrate those models have to fit into the methods carried out for their working. So we propose first doing a critical investigation of different possible methodological approaches for urban goods movement surveying. Secondly we present some recent approaches staying more close to reality, stressing on the necessary quality of data to improve the reliability of the results. Reference : Ambrosini et al., 2008 Ambrosini, C., Meimbresse, B., Routhier, J. L., & Sonntag, H. (2008). Urban freight policy-oriented modeling in Europe. In E. Taniguchi, & R. G. Thompson (Eds.), Innovations in City Logistics. Nova Publishers, 4th quarter 2008

Urban freight establishment and tour based surveys for policy oriented modelling

The surveys specifically focused on the thorough knowledge of urban freight transport appeared about ten years ago. The local problematic of goods transport at local level was partially taken into account by the city planners and by the researchers: until recent years, the integration of goods transport in the total urban flows models was estimated applying a multiplying factor to car traffic. Delivering goods was not considered like a concern. Because of the quick growth of car traffic in the cities, the main stakes changed too: the fight against traffic congestion, the management of the lack of space (shipment consolidation and storage), the attempts to reduce local environmental impacts and global externalities (energy saving, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions), and economic valuation of city centres (under the pressure of a slowed down economic growth). All these changes were taking place in a context in which available rooms for manoeuvre were limited by factors such as congestion, concerns about the quality of urban life and budget restriction. It resulted in a growing unease on the freight transport industry and the city authorities, the latter having little or no data, methods and references in order to elaborate a satisfactory policy framework.

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How to Improve the Capture of Urban Goods Movement Data

Si l'ouvrage montre toute la complexite de la logistique urbaine dans sa globalite, car elle integre les deplacements des marchandises, il fait aussi decouvrir les aspects contradictoires nes des necessites de l'activite economique et de la vie des residents dans un systeme urbain a fortes contraintes de capacite et de diversite d'usage de l'espace alors qu'il est anime par des acteurs aux interets souvent conflictuels. Il s'inspire tout a la fois de l'observation de l'evolution des agglomerations, des mesures reglementaires qui l'ont modelee, des acquis des enquetes realisees dans le cadre du programme national "marchandises en ville". L'ouvrage denonce un certain nombre de dysfonctionnements lies au comportement des agents economiques ou institutionnels. Il presente les experimentations en cours lancees pour y remedier, dans la perspective d'un developpement durable. Sans donner de solutions miraculeuses ou universelles, il permet d'evaluer les moyens les plus efficaces d'aborder les problemes en respectant, pour chaque ville, sa personnalite.

Danièle Patier

Papers

Reducing Social and Environmental Impacts of Urban Freight Transport: A Review of Some Major Cities

A methodology for the evaluation of urban logistics innovations

Urban freight establishment and tour based surveys for policy oriented modelling

How to Improve the Capture of Urban Goods Movement Data

La Logistique dans la ville