Sustainable Logistics in Urban Areas: Innovative Approaches for Externalities Reduction in Smart Cities

Globalization and e-commerce lead the actual growing trends of home delivered goods. The increase of inhabitants in the cities requires more services for the mobility of people. In the coming years, the increasing demand of freight and people transport in urban areas will further stress their negative impacts or externalities. An externality is defined as a cost arising “when the social or economic activities of one group of persons have an impact on another group and when that impact is not fully accounted, or compensated for, by the first group”. The Smart City concept promotes a new vision based on the radical reduction of negative impacts in cities through the use of technological, methodological and organizational innovations. Smart mobility is one of the pillars of this new idea. Several technological and organizational improvements are available in scientific literature such as Electric Vehicles (EVs), ICT tools and systems, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), different usage schemes in urban mobility, policies and rules, and efficient urban mobility management. A new arising concept that could integrate these innovations and strongly reduce externalities in the urban areas is the Mobility as a Service (MaaS) paradigm. People are interested in moving from one point to another in the city and through these new technologies different mobility alternatives are available. The same concept can be considered for goods delivery in urban areas. A high level of service is an important factor in engaging users towards sustainable mobility. The analysis of the last mile logistics innovations shows that it is possible to increase sustainability, reduce the transport externalities in the urban area and, at the same time, improve the companies’ economic results. In urban people mobility, sharing, pooling, and rental systems are also growing thanks to the new types of EVs available on the market such as Electric Light Vehicles, electric kick scooter and Segway. Sharing mobility systems have great potential in cities because they perfectly integrate with public transport to perform short trips or the last leg of the trip in the case of public transport lack or low frequency. In this context, identifying new strategies and ICT innovations to promote the electro-mobility, to improve the efficiency of organizational methods both in freight transport for the last mile logistics and for the people mobility is the aim of this PhD thesis. The crowd-sourcing paradigm and user centric approaches are at the basis of the proposed method solutions in order to reduce the urban externalities. Scientific literature proposes different approaches in the field of policies and rules mainly based on prohibitions and charges; users, on the other hand, can be involved through games and incentive schemes. Economic behaviour, a branch of cognitive science, proposes the positive incentive to define the “nudge” paradigm, in order to help people, make better decisions if they act rationally or if well-informed. In a station based EVs sharing system the relocation process is a fundamental activity to ensure a high service level to users. Relocation is expensive and does not contribute to improve environmental sustainability since additional transport means are adopted to fulfill it. Thus, the idea of involving users in the relocation process through an innovative incentive mechanism can lead to jointly reduce externalities in the urban area and to guarantee high service level to users. Similarity, customers can be involved in the relocation of goods between stores in the city. In addition, the optimization of the incentive-based approach can be applied in the goods cross-distribution between shops and a warehouse in an urban area. The proposed method allows to have both environmental and economic advantages and further engages users in a more sustainable vision with credits to spend on the mobility service or company products. The PhD thesis structure is as follows: 1. State of the art analysis of the transport externalities in urban areas with a focus on the approaches to reduce negative impacts in people mobility and last mile logistics; an evaluation of gaps and achievable targets is proposed. 2. Definition of a new user-centric approaches to develop ICT tools and platform for promoting electro-mobility in urban areas; a Serious Game App developed with the aim of increasing citizens awareness in the use of EVs is detailed. 3. Analysis of the relocation problem in EVs / ELVs sharing systems and innovative strategies for involving users through optimized incentive-based approaches; both a centralized and a distributed optimization approaches developed to reduce the total relocation costs, including external costs are described. In addition, numerical experiments with EVs and ELVs demonstrate the potential benefits of the approaches. 4. Analysis of last mile logistics innovations and definition of a new optimization incentive based approach for the goods relocation and cross-distribution in urban areas; numerical experiments show the internal and external costs reduction achievable by adopting the proposed approach. 5. Conclusions of this work and future research developments.