Different charging strategies for electric vehicle fleets in urban freight transport

The transition from diesel-driven urban freight transport towards more electric urban freight transport turns out to be challenging in practice. A major concern for transport operators is how to find a reliable charging strategy for a larger electric vehicle fleet that provides flexibility based on different daily mission profiles within that...

Running an urban consolidation centre: Binnenstadservice 10 years back and forth

Urban consolidation centres (UCCs) have been discussed over many years in the city logistics literature. The amount of successful UCCs in the long run were, and are, very scarce, though. Little is published on the practical issues and experiences of running a UCC and offering UCC-services. In the Netherlands, Binnenstadservice (BSS) has run UCCs...

Self-organization in parcel distribution - SOLiD's first results

Abstract: To bridge the gap between the long(er) term Physical Internet vision and the short term daily logistics operations, the Dutch Topsector Logistics (TKI Dinalog and NWO) requested a research project that would provide an impulse for self-organizing logistics. This contribution discusses the development of the research project SOLiD, Self...

Public procurement as driver for more sustainable urban freight transport

Authorities aim at making the urban freight system more sustainable. The most common instruments to do so are regulation or stimulation of good practices, by offering subsidies or initiating projects together with the private parties that are responsible for actually performing urban freight transport operations. This contribution examines the...

Economics of electric vehicles for city logistics

Within the FREVUE project 80 fully electric freight vehicles have been deployed. It showed that city logistics operations can be performed by electric freight vehicles, but that at the moment the high vehicle purchasing costs are still a barrier for large scale utilisation of electric freight vehicles for logistics operations. Only for small...

Zero emission city logistics: The possibilities of battery electric reight vehicles, now and in the future

The city logistics system faces serious challenges in the near future, such as zero-emission transport in city centers and the decarbonization of urban freight transport to meet the climate agreements. The city logistics system is in itself a very heterogenous system with many different types and forms of logistics operations. The use of battery...

Living labs: an approach for achieving sustainable change in city logistics

The Living lab is an approach that allows for improving the co-creation processes, putting the end-users at the heart of innovation, realizing new business models, looking for new roles for traditional stakeholders in the innovation process, and a more directed innovation preparation and deployment process. This article describes experiences of...

Zero emission city logistics: Current practices in freight electromobility and feasibility in the near future

This paper examines the feasibility of using electric powered vehicles in urban freight transport from a carrier’s perspective, including their attitudes towards electric freight vehicles (EFVs) and all relevant elements affecting this business case, such as: technological features, existing restricting and promoting policies, financial and non...

Towards zero emission urban logistics: Challenges and issues for implementation of electric freight vehicles in city logistics

Purpose Electric freight vehicles (EFVs) are one of the solutions to improve city logistics’ sustainability. EFVs, that are electric powered light and heavy vehicles with a number plate, have the potential to make zero emission city logistics possible within the urban area. However, although trials have been undertaken for the last years, large...

Ontology-based multi-agent system for urban freight transportation

Congestion, pollution, and safety are some of the most worrisome side-effects of the urban goods movement activities. These problems are generally attributed to the underlying characteristics of the domain such as heterogeneous stakeholders, their conflicting objectives and resulting distributed decision-making. Such autonomous decision-making...

City Logistics in the European CIVITAS Initiative

This paper discusses the developments of city logistics in the CIVITAS initiative. CIVITAS is a large European Commission co-funded program to support sustainable urban mobility. Urban freight logistics is one of eight CIVITAS clusters by which cities aim to improve sustainability in their cities. During the last decade the CIVITAS initiative...

Towards E(lectric)-urban freight: First promising steps in the electric vehicle revolution

Innovative logistics service providers are currently looking for possibilities to introduce electric vehicles for goods distribution. As electrical vehicles still suffer from a limited operation range, the logistical process faces important challenges. In this research we advise on the composition of the electrical vehicle fleet and on the...

Integrated infomobility services for urban freight distribution

City logistics is one of the causes of today's road congestion in our cities, but at the same time its efficiency is affected by the traffic problems. The driving behaviour and mission strategies used by vans and lorries operating in urban areas usually does not exploit modern infomobility solutions. CityLog, a project co-funded by the European...

The influence of road pricing on physical distribution in urban areas

The Dutch government decided to implement a road pricing system called, 'paying differently for mobility'. The main idea is that road users have to pay for using the road infrastructure instead of for owning a car. In the future, the price per kilometre will also depend on the time of the day and the location of the travel. Crowded locations and...