Urban Freight Systems Research Articles

City logistics in an omnichannel environment. The case of Brussels

Consumers live in an omnichannel environment, in which they use both online and offline channels for their shopping activities. The result is an increase in parcels shipped to consumers’ homes, challenging urban freight systems in terms of efficiency and sustainability. Many measures exist, that aim to optimise and improve activities of logistics service providers in urban areas. However, research on the parcel market and its actors is limited, so it is unclear how parcel distribution is organised and which city logistics measures are (not) adopted. This information is needed to re-think parcel distribution and support policy-making that sustains and improves urban sustainability and quality of life. Therefore, we carried out case-study research with focus on Brussels, Belgium’s largest city and capital. Findings demonstrate that logistics service providers are focused on measures that improve distribution efficiency, which is determined by parcel volume, stop density, delivery failure and urban regulation. To this end, pick-up points and lockers and tools to affect receiver behaviour are implemented most. Generally, Brussels’ parcel distribution market is dominated by conventional vehicles and traditional modes of operation, but regulations and policies are advancing the use of micro-hubs in combination with cargo-bikes. Local authorities can facilitate adoption of city logistics measures for parcel distribution by cooperating and exchanging information with the private sector and by developing a harmonised, long-term vision on freight transport policy across cities and regions.

Public procurement as driver for more sustainable urban freight transport

Authorities aim at making the urban freight system more sustainable. The most common instruments to do so are regulation or stimulation of good practices, by offering subsidies or initiating projects together with the private parties that are responsible for actually performing urban freight transport operations. This contribution examines the possibilities for (local) authorities to use their market role, i.e. being a big procurer of goods and services in a city that result in many urban freight transport trips, to stimulate more sustainable urban freight transportation. Procurement is usually not linked to transport and data from procured goods and services do not provide sufficient insights to estimates the impacts of deliveries and trips related to the procured goods and services. This contribution discusses two cases in which (local) authorities try to make the urban freight transport that results from their procurement activities visible, via different methods, such as delivery service plans, and spend analyses. The cases of Rotterdam (in the project BuyZET) and for the logistics hub in The Hague show the first results of how (local) authorities can act to improve urban freight transport once the trips caused by procured goods and services are clearly mapped

Delivery Process for an Office Building in the Seattle Central Business District

Movement of goods within a central business district can be very constraining with high levels of congestion and insufficient curb spaces. Pick-up and delivery activities encompass a significant portion of urban goods movement, and inefficient operations can negatively impact the already highly congested areas and truck dwell times. Identifying and quantifying the delivery processes within the building is often difficult. This paper introduces a systematic approach to examine freight movement, using a process flow map with quantitative delivery times measured during the final segment of the delivery process. This paper focuses on vertical movements such as unloading/loading activities, taking freight elevators, and performing pick-up/delivery operations. This approach allows visualization of the components of the delivery process and identification of the processes that consume the most time and have greatest variability. Using this method, the delivery process for an office building in downtown Seattle was observed, grouped into three major activities (or steps): 1. Entering, 2. Delivering, 3. Exiting. This visualization tool provides researchers and planners with a better understanding of the current practices in the urban freight system, and helps identify the non-value-added activities and time that can unnecessarily increase the overall delivery time.

From Freight Partnerships to City Logistics Living Labs – Giving Meaning to the Elusive Concept of Living Labs

The paper discusses the growing importance of urban freight research given the increasing urban population trends. The complexity of urban freight systems means that it is essential for the public and private sectors to work together - one way to achieve this has been through freight partnerships. A short review of freight partnerships highlights the way in which they have fostered mutual understanding among urban freight stakeholders. The literature on shared situational awareness (SSA) and joint knowledge production (JKP) has been adapted to position freight partnerships and to further develop and link these partnerships to the concept of a living laboratory concerned with urban freight transport. This novel application of the living lab concept is introduced. Next, the first phases of a city logistics living lab brought in practice in Rotterdam are shortly mentioned. The living lab concept fits the complexities of the urban freight system well and has been a cornerstone of a recently started major freight project in the EU (CITYLAB).

Sustainable Urban Freight Systems and Freight Demand Management

The paper defines the field of Freight Demand Management (FDM) and positions it in the broad range of public sector initiatives aimed at improving urban freight activity. To illustrate the magnitude of the impacts of FDM, the paper estimates the contributions to freight traffic by the various industry sectors in a sample of metropolitan areas, establishes the role of freight behavior research, and summarizes the performance of a number of FDM initiatives. The paper ends with a discussion of policy implications and conclusions.

New Opportunities and Challenges for City Logistics

The information revolution is creating both opportunities and challenges for improving the sustainability of urban freight systems. A range of vehicle movement data can now be automatically collected from low cost sensors that are able to assist in improving understanding distribution systems and increasing their efficiency. Vehicle monitoring technologies that have the potential to charge both passenger and goods vehicles for using the road system, allow a new array of pricing schemes to be introduced. However, E-commerce (B2C) is creating a surge in home deliveries that is increasing the social and environmental costs of goods distribution systems. This paper describes some applications of big data systems and decision support systems that can be used to enhance the design and evaluation city logistics schemes. The need to develop improved tools for understanding logistics sprawl and reducing its effects are described. Developments in alternative fuel vehicles and advanced manufacturing systems are also presented.

CLASS: A DSS for the Analysis and the Simulation of Urban Freight Systems

The complexity of methods and models for the investigation of urban freight systems has pushed researchers to develop decision support systems (DSS) for the analysis and simulation of the effects of city logistics measures and the effects of exogenous scenario changes, as land-use, demographic and socio-economic characteristics. In fact, today these types of systems provide to support decision-makers to understand and simulate the structure of freight urban system and to compute some indicators that compared with target and benchmarking values allow to identify its level of service. Such a DSS, named CLASS (City Logistics Analysis and Simulation Support System), has been recently proposed and in this paper some advancements are presented. Then, two application examples for the simulation of urban freight transport in a large urban area and the assessment of freight distribution activity location in a medium size urban area are presented.

An empirical approach for experimental assessments in urban freight

Increasing concerns about sustainable urban freight transport have appeared recently in developed countries. While some methods and indexes exist today to evaluate economic and development sustainability, this paper holds up the need to develop a standard tool to evaluate how an urban freight system is functioning. In this sense, this paper presents the concept, the methodology and the application of a model named Urban Freight Transport Index (UFTI). The general objective of this paper is to propose and apply a methodology for rating and assessing the overall performance of urban freight systems. As a result of the experimental application of UFTI, a mid-size Mexican city was rated on 115 points out of 807 ideal points. It was concluded that the essayed experimental index could be the basis for a more extended standard to be used by local or regional authorities to help the decision making process in urban freight systems. Key words: Freight transportation, urban development, ratings, city logistics, Mexico.

Analysis of urban freight by rail using event based simulation

For the objectives of this discussion an event based simulation model using ARENA is developed to solidify the merits of moving urban freight by rail and demonstrates that it is a viable alternative to the most popular methods in today’s freight markets. A number of technologies are examined, that can be used in the movement of urban freight by rail and look at case studies which have adopted this very methodology to deliver urban freight. More specifically the model developed is used to analyse the current situation, evaluate alternatives and maximise utilisation of the proposed rail system. The information obtained is put to use by designing a freight system for the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, at the very core of which will utilise rail infrastructure. This system aims to be market competitive and to restore faith in transporting urban freight by rail. By doing so, we hope that our results achieve a significant level of usefulness and practicality so that they could be considered when designing future urban freight systems.

Investigation of Attributes Determining Trip Chaining Behavior in Hybrid Microsimulation Urban Freight Models

A hybrid microsimulation modeling framework is proposed to construct goods-related vehicle tours that satisfy a known commodity flow origin–destination (O-D) matrix in an urban freight network. One distinct issue of urban freight systems—trip chaining behavior—is addressed in the modeling procedure. To shed light on the variables that play significant roles in affecting trip chaining behavior, two types of discrete choice models are estimated by using a data set from the integrative freight market simulation. These models generate probabilities that help choose destination locations and make the decision about whether to return to the base or not for each tour until the known commodity O-D matrix is satisfied. The proposed modeling framework was applied to an 84-node test network. Results show that the estimated trip length distribution is consistent with the underlying data set. Meanwhile, several attributes are found to have significant effects on the trip chaining behavior. The choice of the next destination is negatively affected by the distance from the current location to the potential destination and positively affected by the amount of cargo available for pickup and delivery. For the tour termination decision, the perceived utility of returning decreases with the increase of the return distance and increases with the accumulation of cargoes delivered.

Modeling City Logistics

Urban freight systems are experiencing many problems due to higher levels of service and lower costs being demanded by shippers, with carriers having to operate in increasingly congested road conditions. Trucks operating in urban areas produce many negative impacts for society in terms of emissions, crashes, noise, and vibration. City logistics aims to globally optimize urban freight systems by considering the costs and benefits of schemes to the public as well as the private sector. The concepts of city logistics are introduced, and an outline is presented of some models that have recently been developed to predict the consequences of intelligent transportation systems. In particular, a stochastic vehicle routing and scheduling procedure that incorporates the variation of travel times is described. Results indicate that this approach can lead to significant reduction in operating costs by carriers as well as shorter routes with fewer trucks and increased reliability for customers. This procedure also reduces emissions and fuel consumption.