Smart UMH: Smart urban multihub concept: Sustainable and liveable cities with low logistics visibility

Description

Cities suffer from too much traffic, leading to congestion, air and noise pollution. Increased e-commerce popularity intensifies these challenges further. The Covid crisis has proven that our urban logistics systems are neither reliable, resilient, nor sustainable.

Our objective is to develop a future urban logistics concept that is sustainable, resilient, city-friendly, and that reduces the increasing freight traffic in cities, focussing on parcel and other goods deliveries and returns, while increasing the quality of life for city residents. We introduce a coopetitive approach, where competitors naturally cooperate in a smart urban multihub (UMH) and deliver in a white-label approach to decoupling points between customers and suppliers.

This increases logistics efficiency through bundling activities, while leading to reduced costs, reduced vehicle-kilometres driven and CO2 emission savings, and increased social sustainability through higher de-gree of liveability in cities.

Key data

Projectlead

Prof. Dr. Maike Scherrer

Deputy Projectlead

Albert Steiner

Project team

Viola Rühlin, Joel Weingart, Marco Linpinsel, Fabio Thon, Patrick Doege, Dr. Stephan Bütikofer, Dr. Andreas Weiler, Raffael Golomingi, Jasmin Simona Saxer, Ferdinand Mikolasch, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Stölze (Universität St. Gallen), Leon Zacharias (Universität St. Gallen), Prof. Dr. René Schumann (Haute école spécialisée de Suisse occidentale HES-SO)

Project partners

IKEA; H&M; Zalando; Cargo sous terrain AG; Quickpac AG; MS Direct; Swisslog AG; Stadt Zürich / Tiefbauamt; Kanton Zürich / Amt für Mobilität; Universität St. Gallen; Haute école spécialisée de Suisse occidentale HES-SO

Project status

ongoing, started 09/2022

Institute/Centre

Institute of Sustainable Development (INE); Institute of Computer Science (InIT); Institute for Data Science (IDS)

Funding partner

Innosuisse Flagship Initiative