Category «Research»

Next phase for Amsterdam Roboat to boost future-proof urban mobility as a spin-off company

After six years of research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute), Roboat has officially launched independently. The project, which focused on developing autonomous navigation technology for boats for urban and inland waterways, has now transitioned into a spin-off company that will scale up the technology …

Local rules for unaddressed mail work. The Amsterdam example

On 1 January 2018, the municipality of Amsterdam changed the system for the reception of unaddressed mail from presumed consent to explicit consent to reduce paper waste. This policy can be defined as a default nudge. The no-choice population received unaddressed mail in the presumed consent system but not in the new explicit consent system. …

McKinsey: why the economics of electrification make decarbonization transition different?

The economics of decarbonizing fleets are demonstrably viable. Now commercial transport operators need to identify the best way to capture value. McKinsey reports about it based on US data. These segment-specific dynamics are reflected in McKinsey’s financial projections. On a TCO basis, light-commercial vehicles LCVs are already “in the money,” and they expect medium-duty trucks …

ICCT: cost-effectiveness of CO2 reduction strategies for heavy trucks

A new paper by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) assesses the cost-effectiveness of different CO2 reduction strategies for the heavy-duty vehicle (HDV) sector. It examines the required HDV technology market share to meet mandated CO2 reduction targets and the corresponding decarbonization cost. The report also proposes HDV CO2 reduction targets up to 2040. The …

Research: towards a smart urban e-waste system

Efficient electronic waste (e-waste) management is one of the strategies to save materials, critical minerals, and precious metals with limited global reserves. The e-waste collection issue has gained attention in recent years due to low collection rates of e-waste. Shevchenko et al. (2021) aim to search for solutions in the e-waste collection sphere with close-to-zero transport and …

Research: identifying barriers and enablers for circular economy business models

Circular economy business models (CEBMs) are identified as essential levers in the transition to a circular economy (CE). In recent years, a growing body of research has examined the barriers and enablers to these models; however, the available empirical evidence still needs to be improved while sector-specific assessments are lacking. A recent study aims to enrich the …

Industrial symbiosis is essential to the circular transition

The European Commission aims for a full circular economy (CE), which will reuse all resources in 2050. Implementing circular urban supply chains is a major economic transformation that can only work if significant coordination problems between the actors involved are solved. This requires, on the one hand, the implementation of efficient urban collection technologies, where process …

A GPS-based approach to measure the environmental impact of construction-related traffic

Mobilise developed a methodological approach to derive construction-related truck kilometers on city level based on algorithmic and geospatial analyses of GPS data. Results show that large urban construction sites account for 26.4% of total HGV traffic in Brussels. Methodologies used so far make abstraction of traveled vehicle-kilometers (vkm), hence inadequately determining the true environmental impact …

Research: dynamic vehicle routing with random request

Stimulated by the growing demand for logistics services and the advances in information technologies, research interest in the dynamic vehicle routing problem with random requests (DVRPRR) increased over recent decades. The DVRPRR differs from classical vehicle routing in that the customer requests are not fully known in advance but arrive dynamically during the execution of …