Category «Research»

Digital work and urban deliveries: on-demand food delivery

Platform-based on-demand delivery services are rapidly developing in urban areas, especially in the food sector, raising new issues for urban planners, especially in transport. Based on a survey of over 100 couriers conducted in 2018 in the municipality of Paris (France), a new paper aims to analyze the profile, delivery activity, and mobility practices of …

4.0 technologies in city logistics: an empirical investigation of contextual factors

Industry 4.0 technologies, originally developed in the manufacturing sector, can be purposefully implemented to improve City Logistics (CL) processes by automatizing some of their operational tasks and enabling the real-time exchange of information, with the ultimate goal of providing better interconnection among the actors involved. The digital transformation that logistics networks face offers new opportunities …

The carbon footprint of alternative grocery shopping and new transportation options

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the growth of e-commerce and automated warehouses, vehicles, and robots and has created new options for grocery supply chains. As shoppers searched for safe and convenient ways to get essential items, grocers adapted to meet increased e-commerce demand. Micro-fulfillment center enabled grocers to quickly fill pickup orders, sometimes within an …

Research: usability of Physical Internet characteristics for sustainable urban freight

Urban freight logistics currently have to deal with multiple unsustainable conditions. Physical Internet (PI) characteristics promise to make urban freight logistics more sustainable. The PI is a vision that could fundamentally change current logistics operations. Montreuil even thinks that “we face a revolution as radical as the Internet Revolution.” Ballot et al. define the PI …

Research: purchase intention and actual purchase of cargo bikes

To support the penetration of cargo cycles in commercial freight transport, research by Narayanan et al. aims at identifying the significant influencing factors for their purchase, using data from Europe’s largest cargo cycle testing project, “Ich entlaste Städte.” This is achieved by developing binary logit models for the intention to purchase (stated at the end …

Experts’ opinions about lasting innovative technologies in City Logistics

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the relevance of goods delivery in urban areas. However, this activity often generates a negative environmental impact. Several technologies have been proposed in recent years to reduce it, thus forming a complex innovation landscape characterized by different levels of maturity and effects on the City Logistics (CL) system. This complexity …

On-Demand Logistics: solutions, barriers, and enablers

The urban freight sector provides an essential service by delivering goods that shops, companies, and households require at a specific place and time. However, the growth of e-commerce and the dawn of on-demand logistics (after this ODL) have raised citizens’ expectations of logistics systems, further stressing them and increasing their operational and environmental costs. There …