Urban Courier Delivery in a Smart City: The User Learning Process of Travel Costs Enhanced by Emerging Technologies

Abstract

This paper surveys urban courier routing, pointing out the learning process of the generalized travel cost enhanced by using innovations related to the introduction of emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs, i.e., the internet of things, big data, block chain and artificial intelligence), considering a smart city. Couriers, when planning in advance or choosing the routes in real time for delivering to citizens as well as to business users (including retailers), need to consider both the driving and walking routes (i.e., from the delivery bay to the customers) to optimize their activities. A two-layer literature optimization model is recalled, and the main scientific people-centered challenges that need to be addressed under the light of emerging ICTs are identified and explored, which are the learning process of routing attributes, as well as the opportunity to book on-street delivery bays in advance or in real time. Then, after a literature review on modeling courier activities, a unitary formulation is presented that combines old and real-time network data. In addition, integration with new telematics solutions (i.e., delivery bay booking) is pointed out. Finally, discussions on innovations and cost optimization are presented.

Public Transport Infrastructure with Electromobility Elements at the Smart City Level to Support Sustainability

“…There is a need for the private and public sectors to align with the residents themselves. In the area of implementing electromobility into micro-mobility at the smart city level, the implementation of physical parking stands has a positive impact [77]. Convenience and proximity factors play an important role in promoting good parking behaviour [78].…”

“…Convenience and proximity factors play an important role in promoting good parking behaviour [78]. People tend to park responsibly when reserved parking spaces are available [77]. On the other hand, the dangerous aspects of e-scooter usage are increasingly coming to the fore, resulting in their banning and phasing out of public shared e-scooter systems in cities (e.g., Paris or the UK).…”

Methods for Risk Reduction: Modelling Users’ Updating Utilities in Urban Transport Networks

“…), influencing the behavior of people at individual and collective levels. Some applications are proposed in the fields of city logistics [21][22][23] and of ports and maritime transport ( [24]).…”

“…A specification of the updating utility model in dynamic conditions by means of the exponential filter was recently proposed in [21,22,28], where the generic attribute x hk fo is forecasted by considering the inter-periodic process along two reference time periods.…”