by Walther Ploos van Amstel
Cities across Europe are under pressure to deliver cleaner, safer, and more efficient urban logistics. With zero-emission zones expanding, e-commerce booming, and construction traffic reshaping streets, the need for reliable data on freight flows has never been greater. The recent recommendations of the Expert Group on Urban Mobility (EGUM) highlight how data sharing can unlock …
Federated learning (FL) and collaborative AI (CAI) offer new ways to make city logistics more efficient, sustainable, and resilient while protecting sensitive data. In traditional logistics, sharing operational data between companies or with cities is often difficult due to competition and privacy concerns. FL solves this by allowing each company to train AI models locally …
Sustainable management of urban logistics (UL) is becoming increasingly urgent as cities grapple with rising congestion, worsening air quality, and growing e-commerce demand. Traditional freight management models—largely static and inflexible—struggle to cope with dynamic urban environments. A new study by Galkin, Švadlenka, Vrba, and Kijewska (2025) proposes a Dynamic Freight Management (DFM) framework that uses …
A recent thesis addresses one of the most pressing challenges in contemporary urban planning: how to reconcile the growing intensity of urban logistics activities with broader sustainability and livability goals. It adopts a spatial-temporal perspective on logistics operations, combining spatial analytics, machine learning, and case studies from Dutch cities. Conceptual framing The thesis rightly identifies …
In cities around the world, logistics plays a crucial but often invisible role. From early morning supermarket deliveries to the increasing number of parcel vans navigating through neighborhoods, urban freight is an integral part of daily life. Yet, despite its importance, city logistics remains under-researched and poorly understood, mainly due to a lack of good …
As appointed in the EU Circular Economy Action Plan, cities and regions in EU member countries start accompanying their circular economy strategies by monitoring frameworks, often called Circular Economy Monitors (CEM). CEMs need to rely on many statistics and datasets to assess performance towards achieving set targets and steer decision-making. Waste statistics play an essential role in …
Road transport is an enabler for economic and social life and one of the key sectors of the EU, corresponding to at least 5% of the European Gross Value Added and employing around 10.3 million people. Today, approximately 73 % of the total EU population lives in cities, towns, and suburbs, and the urban population’s …
The transport of goods, equipment, and waste to, from, in, and through urban areas (city or urban logistics) is essential for the economic vitality of the city but, at the same time, makes urban environmental and social targets more difficult to achieve The European Green Deal and the UN Sustainability Goals also challenge the ways …
As an online groceries company, Picnic saw an enormous increase in demand during the start of the Corona crisis. Picnic’s systems suddenly experienced traffic peaks of up to 10 to 20 times the pre-Corona peak traffic. Even though they build their systems for scalability, surges like these exposed unknown challenges. In the Picnic blog, Picnic’s Sander Mak …
In the logistics sector, uncertainty about a rapid economic recovery dominates. Dutch ABN Amro is predicting about a 7 percent drop in freight volumes in 2020. Other analyzes predict a 10 to 20 percent drop. How do transport companies survive? The COVID-19 crisis has taught that it revolves around three things: data, data, and data.