City Logistics

Abstract

City Logistics aims to reduce the nuisances, e.g., congestion and the environmental footprint, associated to the transportation of freight within urban areas, while sustaining the social and economic development of the organizations and cities involved. City Logistics achieves its goals through integrated planning of operations. Yet, it also displays several core characteristics, e.g., cooperation among stakeholders, consolidation of cargo of different stakeholders within the same vehicles, synchronization of operations, resource sharing, multi and intermodal operations, which makes fro complex planning problems. Network design is one the main methodologies used to address this issues at the strategic and tactical planning of the system. The particular settings and characteristics of City Logistics systems bringing modeling challenges and conducting to new formulations to account for several layers of facilities and operations, time-dependency of demand and activities, synchronization of fleets at terminals, integration of private and public transportation and logistic means, and combining network design and vehicle routing, to name but a few. This chapter aims to capture these characteristics, present the network design methodology currently available, and identify promising research avenues for City Logistics and network design.