A sustainable on-demand urban delivery service enabled by synchromodality and synergy in passenger and freight mobility

This paper investigates the opportunity to plan for a novel on-demand freight delivery service in urban areas with tight service and sustainability requirements. This contribution first attempts to focus on the feasibility of connecting people and freight mobility through the joint usage of transportation options. It builds on the hyperconnectivity principles enabled by the Physical Internet (PI) manifesto for city logistics, referred to as HCL (Hyperconnected City Logistics). To this end, this paper proposes a model-based decision support approach that seeks to produce effective delivery solutions for an on-demand multimodal transshipment problem. The approach considers multiple mobility options such as on-demand urban delivery services, cargo bikes, tramways, and buses to transship goods from one urban logistic hub to another. This novel short-term response planning problem complements the well-known day-before planning problem. The objective function aims to minimize the impact of freight moves in the time and space of urban transport networks. The proposed solution aims to increase the sustainability of cities by reducing congestion levels, the impact of logistics moves, as well as carbon emissions in urban areas. An illustrative case is provided to demonstrate how the novel multi-mode transportation system could operate and to provide an evaluation of the economic and sustainability benefits of such a system in an urban context. For a hyperconnected network, the impact of freight movements on the time and space of urban transport networks can be reduced by 91%. The results demonstrate the potential of urban synchromodality in improving economic efficiency, service capability, and sustainability.