ZLC Seminar Series: "Study and Diagnosis of Urban Freight Distribution in the Case of the City of Zaragoza"

Speaker
Blanca Esteban, Research Assistant and GIS TechnicianTransport Research Group

Abstract
The study and diagnosis of Urban Freight Distribution (UFD) in the case of the city of Zaragoza was a project developed in 2013 by the Transport research group - Zaragoza Logistics Center (ZLC) together with the Technological Institute of Aragon (ITA) and the Innovative Logistics Association of Aragon (ALIA) for the Municipal Authorities. The goal was to seek efficient solutions for improving the freight mobility within the urban area of Zaragoza. For this, an exhaustive analysis of the current situation of UFD in the city of Zaragoza has been implemented. The UFD is the group of transport operations carried out to enable the delivery of goods to retailers and end consumers. It is the last step in the supply chain, what is called “the last mile”, and even when companies and transport operators invest a lot in improving and optimizing their systems, there is often a gap in the local city administrations to successfully fulfill the whole supply chain. The methodology to approach the UFD analysis consists of the identification of the main problems, the analysis of potential solutions and the evaluation and design of these solutions. The results and conclusions of this study, beyond the direct application to the city of Zaragoza, could be extrapolated to the improvement of the last mile operative to other medium-sized cities all over the world. Future work will be real implementation of different selected pilot tests based on the proposed solutions.