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Local shops, sustainable drops in Leuven (BE)

Empowering local businesses

Author: Marij Lambert / Stad Leuven

When screening sustainable urban logistics solutions and applications, the city of Leuven is constantly seeking for the added value – efficiency – for their local businesses. Promoting local shopping is promoting sustainable dropping and vice versa. So yes, city logistics should focus on safety and clean air, but what if these local SME’s, often micro-entrepreneurs or small enterprises, were to disappear because the solutions don’t fit their needs?

To avoid this doomsday situation, Leuven has defined a framework for a lively and smart city, in which sustainable city logistics can be organised while empowering its local businesses. The framework is based on three smart principles: smart governance, smart stakeholders and – as an enabler or booster for the first two principles – smart data and technology. Recent examples of this integrated approach cover projects on Urban Vehicle Access Control (e.g. TOKEN) and logistic planning tools (e.g. FlexCURB). Focusing on the first mile, the popular local distribution platform “we.deliver” was launched in Leuven in 2022, to centrally organise pick-ups from 100 local web-shops. The platform consolidates first mile flows in the city, and e-commerce parcels are delivered zero emission with LEV’s or cargo bikes. By adding the GREEN-LOG Logistics-as-a-Service (LaaS) solution to the portfolio, Leuven is taking the learnings from we.deliver to a next level.

We.deliver next generation: a multi-layered cake

In the first demo of GREEN-LOG, starting in Fall 2024, the Leuven Living Lab will simulate how the LaaS concept can organise pick-ups and drop-offs in a more efficient way. Therefore, the city will link its historical demand data of we.deliver to realtime supply data from the LSP’s involved in demo 1. Several GREEN-LOG components, for example day-to-day demand prediction and event-driven optimisation scenarios, will be applied to this dataset of historical demand and real-time supply. New consolidation and business opportunities can be predicted in demo 1 and data-driven insights will convince LSP’s to participate in demo 2. Maybe they will shift towards dynamic pricing based on the analysis and recommendations offered by demo 1, in parallel with the dynamic demand and supply from the LaaS?

Apart from the data layer, a policy control layer will be introduced to allow the local authority to apply business rules, aiming for less emissions, less congestion and more road safety. These business rules could be either hard measures that can be enforced (e.g. restrictions like timeframes for deliveries) or soft measures (e.g. preference for zero emission delivery). Deliveries which are compliant with these business rules, should become more attractive to the senders. How? Should senders be nudged through dynamic pricing, through a credit-based nudging system, through non-financial nudging? Surveys and simulations will guide the way in demo 1…

When the new year arrives, we will have had a first taste of a policy-driven, data-driven LaaS. Based on this first demo in Leuven and the experiences of the use cases in Ghent and Mechelen, the technological GREEN-LOG partners will finetune the components and integrations to unleash the real power of the GREEN-LOG LaaS in demo 2, steering the marketplace towards more sustainable delivery options while optimising operations for our local shops!

Photo credit: VISIT Mechelsestraat ©KarlBruninx

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