Three essays on urban freight transport: models and tools for effective city logistics projects

The main purpose of these three years of research, summarized in this thesis, was to investigate the obstacles to the development of the city logistics initiatives by seeking solutions to overcome them through model and framework coming from management and transportation engineering. In particular, following a first analysis of a collection of European projects and a systematic analysis of scientific literature, three main gaps in city logistics have been identified: the lack of the stakeholders’ involvement, the need for data sharing platforms to overcome the current lack of data and the need to define city logistics solutions within the urban ecosystem, making consistent design choices coherently with what is already existing in terms of infrastructures, rules and stakeholders in the context. From these three gaps, three main research questions have arisen: (RQ1) Is it possible to support stakeholders in analysing CL solutions fitting their necessities applying some already existing and consolidate decision-making methods? (RQ2) Is it possible to define a database platform in which it is possible to collect, consult and update as many existing data as possible regarding urban freight transport? (RQ3) How is it possible to optimize city logistics infrastructures in a harmonious and coherent way with respect to the entire city logistics ecosystem? To answers to the research questions, a collection of articles is illustrated in this thesis work. From time to time different methodologies are used and illustrated, derived from the field of management and transport engineering, these different methodologies, such as the Systematic Literature Review, the House of Quality, a framework for building a data sharing platform, the city logistics Ecosystem and a decision-making support model (based on both a covering model and a Monte Carlo simulation) are described in detail in the various chapters of the thesis. In this dissertation work for the first time, the main obstacles to the development of city logistics initiatives, that are the lack of involvement of stakeholders, the lack of data, and the lack of an ecosystem vision of urban transport, have been identified and addressed at the same time. Even if literature sometimes offers some possible solutions to these gaps, few are simple to understand for those who work in the urban freight transport industry, easy to apply and replicable. Both in identifying the gap and in seeking solutions, the solutions showed in this thesis sought to address to those who work in the industry, mainly carriers, retailers, shop owners and public administration representatives, trying to combine scientific research with the search for solutions that can be implemented in practice as requested by such a practical research topic. For this reason, each proposed solution and methodology in this thesis has been implemented and experimented using as a case study the city of Bergamo (and testing its replicability in other European cities such as Saint-Etienne, Luxemburg and Amsterdam). In particular, the initial experience in the “Bergamo Logistica” project, part of the Bergamo 2.035 smart city research program, gave me the opportunity to understand the main critical issues found by the main actors who work in this field (i.e., carriers, couriers, retailers and institutions), to confirm some evidences that I found in the theory (i.e., main research gaps which originates the research questions) and to search for solutions that could both solve research gaps and optimize the daily logistics activities of the operators.