Planning process for pooling integration in city logistics

Abstract

City logistics comprises all freight transportation and distribution activities in urban areas and aims to raise the prosperity of a city while mitigating the negative externalities. Hence, resources scarcity and the need for large investments on initiatives implementation have driven researchers toward collaboration as a promising solution. In conjunction with this, pooling has been emerged as a systematic collaborative solution which is defined as the mutual and contemporary use of resources while all involved stakeholders have direct influence on decision making during the whole process. To this end, a comprehensive approach is required to explain how pooling is achievable in urban area. For this reason, this article focuses on the development of a general framework to discuss required steps to integrate pooling into the city logistics system. This framework includes two main parts: the first part contributes to diagnose the current status of the system while the second part discusses organizational planning steps for the three strategic, tactical and operational level. Furthermore, in the first part of the framework we propose a new concept, Typology of Flow (ToF), which is presented to study the main elements of the city logistics system and consequently, the urban flows with more attention into details. The information provided by this concept will help to choose the most compatible solutions for pooling integration in city logistics.