Overview
The last-mile delivery, i.e. the last section of the transport chain before handling goods to the final clients, is often a critical issue for freight operators. This is particularly true in urban agglomerations, where this final step is often slowed down by many factors, such as burocracy, lack of coordination between local stakeholders, unclear rules about accessiblity of trucks, traffic congestion, etc. A reduced efficiency of city logistics, higher costs and the emission of additional pollutants are some of the main consequences deriving from this situation.
The URBeLOG project aims to develop and test an innovative open, dynamic and cooperative telematics platform providing services and applications for the last mile logistics in urban areas; it enables to aggregate the stakeholders transport ecosystem and to manage the distribution processes – from production to delivery – in real-time.
Moreover, it aims to achieve a virtuous system of freight transportation to rationalize and make the last mile delivery process cost-effective, efficient and sustainable and to promote the creation of an ecosystem for the development of advanced B2B real-time services to be used by stakeholders of the urban area.
The project includes research, development and testing on an urban scale of a complex distributed platform for the collection, processing and fusion of open data intended to manage real-time dynamic routing of the fleets. To achieve these objectives the project includes a set of technological solutions and belonging to a complex ICT architecture which will enable the delivery of a wide range of integrated services and vertical applications for different users, available in multi-channel mode. Specific focus will be given to the adoption of innovative technology solutions, based on international standards and, therefore, replicable in different geographical areas of the country.
URBeLOG integrates main functions allowing the development of processes, services and applications for City Logistics of the future. Pilot sites are the cities of Milan and Turin, along with a number of different follower sites in Italy (i.e. Bologna, Rome, and Naples, among others). The two pilot cities represent different application and process case studies that will allow significant testing of project results, as well as potential replication to other metropolitan areas.
URBeLOG project integrates different functions to enable an efficient, cost-effective and eco-sustainable last mile logistics process. The system that will be developed will operate in synergy with many of the existent ICT platforms integrating the different solutions. Starting from available systems in use, the project will identify elements necessary to establish a suite of logistic processes that are more efficient, cost-effective and eco-sustainable and to design and test ICT solutions in the field to effectively meet the needs of the local public administration and of industry operators.
Funding
Results
URBeLOG project is developing a platform enabling metropolitan Areas in Italy to pursue a new paradigm of urban freight distribution management tackling with the limited access to incentives for sustainable operators. The first step is the signature of a dedicated Framework Agreement to share and develop the most significant experiences in the field of urban freight distribution. The Agreement signed between Ministry of Transport and the network of Municipalities (ANCI) in 2012, have had two important outcomes beside others, i.e. harmonization of regulations for users and the use of ITS systems to increase control and efficiency (i.e. enhancement control, increase transparency).
The measures that are under implementation in the Italian metropolitan areas have been designed in order to represent a mix of pull and push measures. In fact, if on one side it set fixed deadlines for banning polluting commercial vehicles (i.e. from 2014 onwards, minimum Euro 4 compliant and from 2016 Euro 5 minimum), on the other side it establish negotiations on public funding for fleet renewals with the Ministry of Economic Development.
More crucially, the Agreement sets up a recognition scheme for commercial vehicles (registration in a specific database) with two conditions to be fulfilled: the vehicle has to ensure lower pollution, and it has to be endowed with on-board GPS devices (in order to allow the municipality to trace vehicles in the city). The upcoming steps of the project will demonstrate the impact of URBeLOG measures towards a “near-zero emission” urban logistics in Italian metropolitan areas.