Supply Chains and Urban Logistics Platforms - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 11

nature and the quantity of ordered products, these deliveries are performed from
traditional regional platforms, platform located near large cities or from shops used
as proximity picking sites.
The goal is to mix transports and logistics activities of all kinds of shops
(hypermarket, supermarket, convenience store…). To cope with this many various
needs supply chains are reset, taking into account three dimensioning factors:

• The delivered volume: if a hypermarket needs the deliveries of ten articulated
vehicles a day, a small shop will only need ten palettes, and sometimes not even
every day!
• The delivery frequency: the suppression of storage on the selling spot imposes a
just-in-time organization, increasing the number of deliveries and thus the time
spent by vehicles in the city.
• The location of the shops in the delivery route: their position relatively to
efficient transport infrastructures, the accessibility will impact the delivery time.

The final target of this approach is to limit the frequencies of delivery to two or
three times a week for small shops. The chosen logistics scheme will be the one
offering the best balance between delivery frequency, environmental impacts and
stockout rates.

3.2 Tomorrow's Predictable Demand

The future demand will ease the evolution from the stage of experiment to the
industrial deployment of innovative solutions. Nowadays too few companies take
the risk of innovation, the initiatives being mostly private, shippers are just fol-
lowing the initiatives led by the logistics providers. The allocation of resources to
this cause is necessary to enter in an applicative step. The factors of the evolution
of demand can be related to a development of:

• Delivery at home (Durand et al. 2010 ): a consequence of the increasing prices of
fuels is the progressive abandon of cars by city-dwellers, 12 individuals will use
more frequently this type of service. This trend evolves in parallel of the use of
relays.
• Relays: the use of relays where the goods are stored during a short period of
time, allows the disconnection between the delivery itself, and the moment
when the goods come to the hands of the customers. It is mainly characterized
by the fact that the customer can pick the shipment up whenever he wants
without constraining the delivery operation. This sort of tool facilitates the
transport operation and gives higher comfort to customers who can pick-up their

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In Paris, one out of two households is not motorized.