from the article: "Abstract The way in which construction logistics is organised has considerable impact on production flow, transportation efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions and congestion, particularly in urban areas such as city centres. In cities such as London and Amsterdam municipalities have issued new legislation and stricter conditions for vehicles to be able to access cities and city centres in particular. Considerate clients, public as well private, have started developing tender policies to encourage contractors to reduce the environmental impact of construction projects. This paper reports on an ongoing research project applying and assessing developments in the field of construction logistics in the Netherlands. The cases include contractors and third party logistics providers applying consolidation centres and dedicated software solutions to increase transportation efficiency. The case show various results of JIT logistics management applied to urban construction projects leading to higher transportation efficiencies, and reduced environmental impact and increased production efficiency on site. The data collections included to-site en on-site observations, measurement and interviews. The research has shown considerable reductions of vehicles to deliver goods and to transport workers to site. In addition the research has shown increased production flow and less waste such as inventory, waiting and unnecessary motion on site."
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Urban Consolidation Centres (UCCs) are often put forward as a solution to reduce the negative impact of freight transport on cities. However, few UCCs have so far successfully attracted sufficient volume to become viable. Receivers of goods can potentially be effective initiators of a UCC, due to their buying power. The purpose of this research is to learn how receiver-led consolidation initiatives develop. We use qualitative data on four receiver-led UCCs in The Netherlands to understand the success factors and challenges in various stages of development. Our research shows that receivers can help during the start-up stage of a UCC, when they have a large volume of goods, can convince internal stakeholders, and are willing to pay or can make suppliers pay. However, receiver-led UCCs still face challenges related to growth in the later stages and require continuous effort to attract volume.
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A new urban consolidation centre, called Binnenstadservice.nl ('Inner city service'), started business in April 2008 in the Dutch city of Nijmegen. The consolidation centre in Nijmegen differs from initiatives in the past, distinguishing itself from other UCC initiatives by its focus on receivers rather than on carriers. After one year already 98 stores joined Binnenstadservice.nl and this number is still growing. Due to Binnenstadservice.nl, fewer trucks enter the city centre and fewer kilometres are driven. In this paper we provide insights into the local effects of the Binnenstadservice pilot after one year, such as air quality, inconvenience for residents and noise nuisance. The effects on local air quality and noise nuisance are limited, due to the amount of passenger and bus traffic remaining. Plans exist to start Binnenstadservice.nl franchises in other Dutch cities, which could result in making Binnenstadservice.nl a more serious partner for carriers to handle the transport of last mile distribution in cities.
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Urban consolidation centres (UCCs) have been discussed over many years in the city logistics literature. The amount of successful UCCs in the long run were, and are, very scarce, though. Little is published on the practical issues and experiences of running a UCC and offering UCC-services. In the Netherlands, Binnenstadservice (BSS) has run UCCs and UCC services for over a decade now. This contribution discusses development and the experiences of running a UCC in practice in the form of seven lessons, including the evolvement of the business model and organisation model, as well as the development from offering 'only' the cross-dock of physical flows, to that of the full triple cross-dock, including financial and information flows. Next, UCCs can be the answer to future challenges, such as zero emission city logistics and fit perfectly into the Physical Internet vision.
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Cities’ sustainability strategies seem to aim at the reduction of the negative impacts of urban freight transport. In the past decades, many public and private initiatives have struggled to gain broad stakeholder support and thus remain viable. Researchers and practitioners have only recently recognised stakeholder acceptance of urban freight solutions as a challenge. A first step in achieving convergence is to understand stakeholder needs, preferences and viewpoints. This paper proposes and applies an approach to identify the main stakeholder perspectives in the domain of urban freight transport. We use Q-methodology, which originates from social sciences and psychology, to record subjective positions and identify the dominant ones. We explain the approach, operationalise the method for the domain of urban freight transport and apply it to stakeholder groups in the Netherlands. We find four dominant perspectives, reflecting how stakeholders normally take positions in the urban freight dialogue. Important findings concern disparities between industry associations and some of their membership, divergent views about the expected role of public administration, and the observation that the behaviour of shippers and Logistics Service Providers (LSP) appears to be inconsistent with their beliefs. All these factors together can act as a barrier to the implementation of urban freight consolidation concepts. The Q-methodology is valuable for eliciting perspectives in urban freight and is a promising tool to facilitate stakeholder dialogue and, eventually, convergence.
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Landside operations in air cargo terminals consist of many freight forwarders (FFWs) delivering and picking up cargo at the capacity-constrained loading docks at the airport's ground handlers' (GHs) facilities. To improve the operations of the terminal and take advantage of their geographical proximity a small set of FFWs can build a coalition to consolidate stochastically-arriving shipments and share truck fleet capacity while other FFWs continue bringing cargo to the terminal in a non-cooperative manner. Results from a detailed discrete-event simulation model of the cargo landside operations in Amsterdam Aiport showed that all operational policies had trade-offs in terms of the average shipment cycle time of coalition FFWs, the average shipment cycle time of non-coalition FFWs, and the total distance traveled by the coalition fleet, suggesting that horizontal cooperation in this context was not always beneficial, contrary to what previous studies on horizontal cooperation have found. Since dock capacity constitutes a significant constraint on operations in air cargo hubs, this paper also investigates the effect of dock capacity utilization and horizontal cooperation on the performance of consolidation policies implemented by the coalition. Thus, we built a general model of the air cargo terminal to analyze the effects caused by dock capacity utilization without the added complexity of landside operations at Amsterdam Airport to investigate whether the results hold for more general scenarios. Results from the general simulation model suggest that, in scenarios where dock and truck capacity become serious constraints, the average shipment cycle times of non-coalition FFWs are reduced at the expense of an increase in the cycle times of FFWs who constitute the coalition. A good balance among all the performance measures considered in this study is reached by following a policy that takes advantage of consolidating shipments based on individual visits to GH.
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The objective of this research is to advice the Municipality of The Hague whether, if and under which conditions, the implementation of an Urban Consolidation Centre (UCC) is possible and desirable. To determine factors that caused the success or failure of UCCs in practice, a survey of 6 cases in Europe is conducted. The cases were selected because of the similarity of the service area of the UCC and the city centre of The Hague or because of the uniqueness of the UCC. To determine the possible success for a UCC in The Hague four scenarios are evaluated. Two major difficulties with implementing the UCC are the allocation of the costs and benefits and the willingness to cooperate of the transportation companies. Both consignees and transportation companies can benefit financially from using the UCC. The UCC operator, however, incurs the costs. The municipality should play a role in bringing the costs and benefits together. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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The research presented in this thesis has highlighted (bio)geochemical, hydrological, and wetland ecological processes that interact and enhance ecosystem development on wetlands built on fine sediment. A combination of greenhouse and laboratory experiments were conducted. Some measured data from these experiments formed important input for subsequent analysis in a modeling environment. The findings presented in Chapters 2-6 can be divided into four topics: 1) Plant–soil interactions in the terrestrial zone, 2) wetland–terrestrial processes influencing nutrient availability in the land–water zone, 3) effects of plants on sediment consolidation in the terrestrial zone, and 4) effects of bioturbation on nutrient availability in the aquatic zone. The next sections give a summary of the results for these four topics. The last section summarizes the recommendations formulated for the Marker Wadden project.
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Abstract: Last few years the hindrance, accidents, pollution and other negative side effects of construction projects and namely construction transport have become an issue particularly in urban areas across Europe such as in London, and in the Netherlands as well, including the cities of Utrecht, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Municipalities have issued new legislation and stricter conditions for vehicles to be able to access cities and city centres in particular and accessibility of older and polluting vehicles. Considerate clients, public as well private, have started developing tender policies to encourage contractors to reduce the environmental impact of construction projects. Contractors and third party logistics providers have started applying consolidation centres. These developments have shown considerable reductions of number of vehicles needed to deliver goods and to transport workers to site. In addition these developments have led to increased transport efficiency, labour productivity and cost reductions on site as well as down the supply chain. Besides these developments have led to increased innovations in the field of logistics planning software, use of ICT , and handling hardware and equipment. This paper gives an overview of current developments and applications in the field of construction logistics in the Netherlands, and in a few project cases in particular. Those cases are underway as part of an ongoing applied research project and studied by using an ethnographic participative action research approach. The case findings and project results show initial advantages how the projects, the firms involved and the environment can profit from the advancement of logistics management leading to reduced environmental impact and increased efficiencies of construction transport.
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