A New Perspective on City Logistics: Concepts, Theory, and Models for Designing and Managing Logistics as a Service

Introduction

Several social, economic, and technological trends are coming together to revolutionize the way people, products, and services are brought together. Goods are gaining more mobility with drastic implications for cities.

Current Challenges

The current city logistics (CL) paradigm, which does not consider the mobility of goods a public need, limits our capacity to understand and respond to the challenges and opportunities brought by this profound change.

Proposed Solution

Taking a different perspective, GoodMobility proposes to replace the techno-business-centric smart thinking with network-centric wise logistics that takes public value as the primary goal. This vision includes:

1. Setting up a logistics web with the required infrastructure (hardware) and operating procedures (software) to establish logistics as a service (LaaS).
2. Developing public value as a measurement system to assess and guide CL planning and management.

Objectives

Objective 1: Measurement System Development

The first objective is to develop public value as a measurement system to assess and guide CL planning and management. This will be achieved through an iterative process that combines:

• Multi-criteria decision making
• Sustainability analysis
• Simulation
• Optimization

Objective 2: Infrastructure Design

The second objective is to develop the principles, models, and tools for LaaS infrastructure design. Novel network optimization methods will be developed for designing the hardware of LaaS to provide:

• Orders of magnitude efficiency gains
• Influence on stakeholder activities to maximize public value

Objective 3: Operating Procedures Framework

The third objective is to develop a theoretical framework and models for the operating procedures of LaaS. This includes introducing logistics markets to ensure:

• Efficiency and reliability
• Securing public value in matching logistics demand and supply

Learning-based optimization methods will be developed to manage logistics markets.

Conclusion

If successful, GoodMobility will lay the foundations of a new theory of CL with significant scientific and practical implications. The novel ideas, concepts, and methodologies will open up new research perspectives in transport and logistics with far-reaching social, economic, and environmental consequences.