by Walther Ploos van Amstel
New opportunities arise to design profitable last-mile delivery strategies. In particular, companies can influence customer behavior by choosing the lead-times or time-slots that are offered (capacity controls) and as well as their associated fees (pricing controls). These decisions ultimately seek to balance the capacity utilization and increase the profitability of the delivery operation.
The growth of urban populations will generate a need to further develop cities, which will lead to a significant increase in construction work in cities. Because of the change from building in greenfield areas to brownfield areas, more people will experience the accompanying nuisances the increase of construction work brings.
Urban Consolidation Centres (UCCs) are often conceived as an enabler to alleviate negative effects associated with distribution of goods in cities, such as traffic congestion and hazardous emissions. UCCs not only have the potential to reduce these effects but also provide alternative distribution solutions by introducing new transhipment points.
More European cities see construction logistics as part of urban freight policies, but also a lot of European cities do not have any initiatives yet. However, the awareness to deal with urban construction logistics is growing. These are the conclusions of the latest SUCCESS-report on the experience and maturity of 12 European cities in construction logistics.
Urban consolidation centres (UCCs) are a popular measure in city logistics. However, many UCCs strongly rely on government subsidies and are granted a short life because of their inability to reach financial sustainability. Despite the interest from both the practitioners and the research community, there are a limited number of quantitative contributions that investigate the …
Rapid urban growth has posed both challenges and opportunities for city planners, not in the least when it comes to the design of urban freight systems. But urbanization also fosters innovation and sharing, which have led to new models for organizing urban freight, e.g. crowd based logistics.
Home deliveries are the preferred method of delivery for consumers today. But, due to the specific, costly nature of home deliveries together with changes within society e.g. people working longer and more flexible hours and the competition between logistics providers, new more sustainable alternatives are being implemented. Automated parcel lockers being such an alternative. Check …
To increase the benefits of a UCC in city logistics, the delivery to the final customers from the UCC can be done using light electric freight vehicles. These LEFV provide numerous operational benefits due to their smaller size while being more sustainable than regular light commercial vans.
A new research paper by Michela Le Pira et. al. addresses the complex problem of multi-stakeholder decisions in urban freight transport policy-making from a public authority perspective, by proposing a procedure based on a modelling approach to support stakeholder involvement in the decision making process.
The trend towards shorter delivery lead-times reduces operational efficiency and increases transportation costs for internet retailers. Mobile technology, however, creates new opportunities to organize the last-mile. In a paper from 2016 researchers from Erasmus University (NL) study the concept of crowdsourced delivery that aims to use excess capacity on journeys that already take place to …