In recent years, cycling has emerged as an increasingly important consideration for national and local authorities around the world, primarily because of the public’s growing awareness about its health benefits and greenhouse emissions reduction. In the last decade, transport related policies in Malaysia and particularly in Kuala Lumpur have been seeking to support cycling as a travel mode, yet, cycling levels in Kuala Lumpur remain low and evidence about interventions are mixed. Data from an exploratory case study is used here to understand the transportation system planning and urban growth of Kuala Lumpur and their impact on cycling uptake, ex- amining current status of cycling facilities in KL, evaluating effectiveness of the cycling interventions, and the attitudes of participants of cycling events towards using bicycle. Using a combination of evidences from existing literature, observation referring to the quality and use of the first bicycle pathway in Kuala Lumpur, interviews with city officials and a survey of people’s attitudes towards using bicycle, this exploratory research highlights the challenges that a car dependent city faces in its urban transformation and in promoting cycling, as well as the residents’ motivations and deterrents to use bicycle for commuting.
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In this paper, we present the challenges, failures and successes on urban freight transportation. We first identify the various involved stakeholders with their interests. Then we evaluate a large number of urban freight transport initiatives and identify lessons learned, which are distinguished in policy, logistics and technology based views. Further, we present a vision for urban freight transportation, which is not only based on the lessons learned, but also on actual market research reports and recent findings.
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The field of city logistics can be characterized by its many local demonstrations and trials, that are quite often not lasting longer than the trial period. The number of demonstrations that continued and were implemented in daily practice is limited. Freight partnerships proved to be a good first step to engage stakeholders. This contribution proposes a new way to develop a more action-driven form of these partnerships that follows from a solution approach, which has proved successful worldwide in fostering innovation deployment, but has not yet been applied explicitly in the domain of City Logistics: Living Labs. The living lab approach ensures that the stakeholders are involved much earlier in the in planning and implementation processes, and that the proposed city logistics implementation is revised and continuously improved to meet stakeholder needs and obtain maximum impact for a long time. This contribution summarizes the steps that have to be taken to set-up and work in a city logistics living lab (CLLL). A CLLL can be defined as a dynamic test environment where complex city logistics innovations can be implemented, following a cyclical approach, where several solutions can be experimented and re-adjusted or improved to fit the real-life city challenges. In the Horizon 2020 project CITYLAB, we developed practical guidelines for establishing and running a city logistics living lab based on several living lab- and field test methodologies that enables stakeholders to set-up and run a CLLL. This contribution discusses the most important CLLL phases, roles, and characteristics, as well as the tools that are available. Next, this contribution shows the first results of cities in which CLLLs are actually set up, or already running. © 2016 The Authors.
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Drones have been verified as the camera of 2024 due to the enormous exponential growth in terms of the relevant technologies and applications such as smart agriculture, transportation, inspection, logistics, surveillance and interaction. Therefore, the commercial solutions to deploy drones in different working places have become a crucial demand for companies. Warehouses are one of the most promising industrial domains to utilize drones to automate different operations such as inventory scanning, goods transportation to the delivery lines, area monitoring on demand and so on. On the other hands, deploying drones (or even mobile robots) in such challenging environment needs to enable accurate state estimation in terms of position and orientation to allow autonomous navigation. This is because GPS signals are not available in warehouses due to the obstruction by the closed-sky areas and the signal deflection by structures. Vision-based positioning systems are the most promising techniques to achieve reliable position estimation in indoor environments. This is because of using low-cost sensors (cameras), the utilization of dense environmental features and the possibilities to operate in indoor/outdoor areas. Therefore, this proposal aims to address a crucial question for industrial applications with our industrial partners to explore limitations and develop solutions towards robust state estimation of drones in challenging environments such as warehouses and greenhouses. The results of this project will be used as the baseline to develop other navigation technologies towards full autonomous deployment of drones such as mapping, localization, docking and maneuvering to safely deploy drones in GPS-denied areas.
Deploying robots from indoor to outdoor environments (vise versa) with stable and accurate localization is very important for companies to secure the utilization in industrial applications such as delivering harvested fruits from plantations, deploying/docking, navigating under solar panels, passing through tunnels/underpasses and parking in garages. This is because of the sudden changes in operational conditions such as receiving high/low-quality satellite signals, changing field of view, dealing with lighting conditions and addressing different velocities. We observed these limitations especially in indoor-outdoor transitions after conducting different projects with companies and obtaining inaccurate localization using individual Robotics Operating Systems (ROS2) modules. As there are rare commercial solutions for IO-transitions, AlFusIOn is a ROS2-based framework aims to fuse different sensing and data-interpretation techniques (LiDAR, Camera, IMU, GNSS-RTK, Wheel Odometry, Visual Odometry) to guarantee the redundancy and accuracy of the localization system. Moreover, maps will be integrated to robustify the performance and ensure safety by providing geometrical information about the transitioning structures. Furthermore, deep learning will be utilized to understand the operational conditions by labeling indoor and outdoor areas. This information will be encoded in maps to provide robots with expected operational conditions in advance and beyond the current sensing state. Accordingly, this self-awareness capability will be incorporated into the fusion process to control and switch between the localization techniques to achieve accurate and smooth IO-transitions, e.g., GNSS-RTK will be deactivated during the transition. As an urgent and unique demand to have an accurate and continuous IO-transition towards fully autonomous navigation/transportation, Saxion University and the proposal’s partners are determined to design a commercial and modular industrial-based localization system with robust performance, self-awareness about the localization capabilities and less human interference. Furthermore, AlFusIOn will intensively collaborate with MAPS (a RAAKPRO proposed by HAN University) to achieve accurate localization in outdoor environments.
The production, use, disposal and recovery of packaging not only generates massive volumes of waste, it also consumes raw materials, water and energy (Fitzpatrick et al. 2012). Simultaneously, consumers have shown an increasing interest in products incorporating sustainable and social attributes (Kletzan et al., 2006). As a result, environmentally friendly packaging, also called ecofriendly or sustainable packaging, has become mainstream. In this context, packaging is more than just ensuring the product's protection and easing transportation, it is also a communicative tool (Palmer, 2000) and it becomes associated with multiple drivers of the purchasing process. Consequently, companies face pressure to innovate responding to consumer demands, and focusing on sustainable solutions that reduce harmful materials and favour green alternatives for both, the product and the packaging. Although the above has triggered research on consumer choice for sustainable products and alternatives on sustainable packaging, the relation between sustainable packaging and consumer behaviour remains underexplored. This research unpacks this relationship, i.e., empirically verifies which dimensions (recyclability, biodegradability, reusability) of sustainable packaging are perceived and valued by consumers. Put differently, this research investigates consumer behaviour towards the functions of sustainable packaging in terms of product protection, convenience, reliability of information and promotion, and scrutinises the perceived credibility of the associated ethical responsibility claims. It aims to identify those packaging materials and/or sustainability characteristics perceived as more sustainable by consumers as well as the factors influencing actual consumer choice towards sustainable packaged products. We aim to gain more insights in the perceptual frame that different types of consumers apply when exposed to sustainable packaging. To this end, we will make use of revealed preference methods to measure consumer valuations of sustainable packaged products. This game-theoretic approach should provide a more complete depiction of consumers' perceptions and preferences.
Lectoraat, onderdeel van NHL Stenden Hogeschool
