Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
2 Urban Consolidation and City Logistics Systems
Urban logistics involves different stakeholders, like retailers and other urban
commercial and service premises, wholesalers and distribution companies, trans-
port and logistics carriers, public administrations and real estate actors among
others (Ambrosini and Routhier 2004 ). In order to deal with city logistics objec-
tives (i.e. reduce congestion and environmental nuisances related to urban freight
distribution without penalizing urban premises and inhabitants), several solutions
and actions can be applied. Different types of actions can be defined in literature
(Munuzuri et al. 2005 ; Benjelloun et al. 2010 ; Russo and Comi 2010 ; Ville et al.
2012 ); we can group them on three main categories:
• Policy and planning actions, related to public authorities;
• Organizational actions;
• Technological actions.
According to Gonzalez-Feliu et al. ( 2012a ), the combination of all three cate-
gories of actions allows an efficient reduction of travelled distances then of con-
gestion and environmental nuisances. However, we observe from their results that
the impacts of each one are not the same. In other words, without organizational
changes, both other categories have a limited impact on congestion reduction or
transfer the problems to others sections of the city. So, innovative organizational
strategies and models are needed, to improve the efficiency of freight transport
(important for shippers, receivers and transport and logistics carriers), reduce
vehicle flows and types (important for public authorities and citizens) and envi-
ronmental issues (where most stakeholders are involved but public authorities are
more sensible to). We have to note that those organizational changes have to be
done without penalizing the economic activities of the city and ensuring the
involvement of the different stakeholders related to urban logistics. For those
reasons, city logistics offer great challenges and opportunities for operations
research, management sciences and combinatorial optimization, in particular when
dealing with vehicle routing and fleet management.
Because one of the most efficient ways to reduce the number of vehicles and
improve their loading rates is commodity aggregation, urban consolidation has
become one of the pillars of city logistics. Consolidation can take place at different
stages of the urban supply chain (Danielis et al. 2012 ; Morana 2013 ) and using the
different urban logistics facilities that exist in urban areas (Boudouin et al. 2013 ).
Although different forms of consolidation can be defined, we focus on multi-actor
approaches, i.e. schemes where different actors will bring freight to consolidation
platforms, mainly in the surroundings of a city, from where commodity needs to be
transported to customers within the city (Crainic et al. 2012 ). The fundamental
idea of such schemes arises on the facto of considering shipments, carriers,
vehicles and consignees not individually, but rather as components of an integrated
logistics system (Crainic 2008 ). Then, the consolidation of shipments in a logistics
pooling scheme (Gonzalez-Feliu and Morana 2011 ) is needed, in order to deliver
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