Defining and Evaluating Collaborative Urban Freight Transportation Systems

Abstract

Collaborative transportation systems are relatively new concepts in research, but are very popular in practice. In the last years, collaborative transportation seems a good city logistics alternative to classical urban consolidation centers, but it is still in a development stage. This paper proposes a framework to define and evaluate collaborative urban transportation systems. This framework is organized in the following modules: a knowledge management system, a scenario simulator, a transportation management system, an environmental module, a risk factor estimation module and a multi-criteria decision support method. Finally, five realistic scenarios for the urban area of Lyon (France) are simulated and discussed to illustrate the proposed framework possible applications.