SUSI - Sustainable Urban Supply Chains Through Horizontal Collaboration and Integrating the City Perspective (FWO Project)

Increasingly, cities aim at improving the sustainability and efficiency of their urban supply chains, byrestricting the use of certain vehicles or improving collaboration among supply chain actors.Additionally, new technologies and trends are emerging, e.g., micro consolidation centers, sidewalkrobots, autonomous vehicles, synchromodality, etc.These trends generate a myriad of difficult intertwined strategic and operational decision problems.Currently, however, the optimization and simulation tools required to support decision-making insuch a complex environment are (1) disjointed and scattered across thescientific literature, or (2) not mature enough to adequately handle emerging urban logistic trends. To bridge this gap in the literature, and to aid cities and supply chain actors in modelling andoptimizing the supply chains, we propose to develop a comprehensive and complementary suite ofurban logistics optimization algorithms for “the” city. These problems of optimizingurban supply chains are typically large-scale, multi-level and multi-objective. In order toappropriately model and solve these problems, significant advances in operations researchtechniques are required.They will ultimately contribute to improving the understanding of theimpact of new technologies, trends, and policies for all urban logisticsstakeholders, and support their decisions towards a more sustainablecity

• Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL)

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