Overview
The Italian port cities are characterized by high levels of air pollution from ships in dock and determined by the traffic congestion for the media that the output from the port transiting the urban road network. The topic of logistics in port areas Italian is a central issue for the sustainable development of coastal urban areas.
The objective of the SMART TUNNEL project was the development of technologies for the control and rationalisation of mercantile and passenger ship traffic in port areas, the movement and management of containers and the movement and management of auto-vessels.
To this aim, the project concentrated on creating a modular technological platform of support to port logistical branches and of road transport of goods based on the integration of IT technologies and innovative communication systems.
The project focused on developing and experimenting with forms of the logistical chain in global maritime transport, maximising the security and efficiency of port-retroport-inland terminal corridors, to encourage processes of port regionalisation and to increase the competitiveness of the regional intermodal system. In the field of urban mobility it focused on more integration of the logistical chain in the urban transport of goods, by making operational models available for the network design of land-side transport activities (inter-modal and co-modal transport), application of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) tools for the management of flow of goods and vehicular fleets (optimisation of loads), as well as for the planning of routes (routing).
Funding
Results
The key points of the results of the project are:
- the intermodality of the systems which manage flow of goods along the logistical value chain, aimed at the optimisation of transport by integrating services of storage and transport in the whole chain of provision, with the aim of optimising load/unload time and operations, to guarantee the quality of the loading and the saturation of the capacity of the vessels and the units of circulation through a combination of "non-intensive" transport acts, which tend to prioritise the saturation of vessels with respect to delivery speed;
- the inoperability of the systems which manage flow of information relative to the logistical value chain: founded on the use of immaterial networks, according to "fourth party logistics providing" models and/or models of "e-logistics exchanging", models which, if implemented at the capillary level along the whole logistical supply chain, can contribute to the creation of a sustainable logistical system.