An Emerging and Innovation Transport Solution: Towards Transforming Parking Lot to Urban Consolidation Centre: Madrid Living Lab

Abstract

The need for emerging and innovative transport solutions has increased during the last decade due to the cities’ population growth and consumers’ trends towards eCommerce, a situation exacerbated by COVID-19. One of the most promising solutions to deal with last-mile logistics challenges is the installation of facilities strategically located within the city boundaries as Urban Consolidation Centres to move the goods from a conventional vehicles supplying the facility into smaller electric vehicles. In parallel, cities aim to become “smart cities” with the digital twin as an ultimate goal to merge physical and virtual environments. This paper explores the concept of digital twin and Urban Consolidation Centres. It presents different open data models, software tools and the integration to calculate city sustainability and operators’ performance indicators to leverage the results to improve policy-making and business decisions. It compares the Madrid business as usual scenario with the benefits of introducing Urban Consolidation Centres in a public parking lot in the centre of Madrid within the Low Emissions Zone and using electric vans to supply the Urban Consolidation Centres with electric tricycles to deliver to the end consumers. After validating the results between the real and virtual life experiments, Madrid will explore this simulation environment to understand the impacts of modifying the underlying business schemes. Policymakers and operators can respond to emerging research questions such as “what are the effects of defining new low emission zones?”; “what if we shift the location for the UCC or use other types of vehicles?