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Since the 1990’s, researchers, practitioners and public administrations have given more thought to urban logistics. However, their interests and goals are not the same, and several approaches do not produce efficient logistics systems as a result. This book aims to provide both a conceptual framework for urban logistics planning and management and to create a basis for deploying solutions that aim to reduce the main nuisances related to urban goods. The proposed book is divided in two parts. The first proposes a set of methodological chapters, written by key authors, which aim to support decision makers in their current choices related to urban logistics. In addition to public authorities’ aims and goals, the book highlights the importance of private actors, and shows how supply chain management can deal with the problems of the last urban mile and its integration in global logistics chains. The second presents several applied research works that deal with current planning and practice issues in urban logistics, such as the role of city planning, the place of night deliveries in carrier organization, the limits of logistics pooling, and the real estate market, among others. The book was written by key authors, all having considerable research experience and recognised as experts in their respective fields. Each chapter presents methods and results of research works, written for a broad audience, and more precisely directed to both academics and practitioners.

Evaluating the role of logistics and supply chain management skills or applications is necessary for the success of any organization or business. As market competition becomes more aggressive, it is crucial to evaluate ways in which a business can maintain a strategic edge over competitors. The Handbook of Research on Information Management for Effective Logistics and Supply Chains highlights strategies, tools, and skills necessary for supply management within organizations and companies. Featuring best practices and empirical research within the field, this handbook is a critical reference source for scholars, practitioners, researchers, information systems and telecommunication specialists, and managers.

​This book extends the existing demand fulfillment research by considering multi-stage customer hierarchies. Basis is a two-step allocation and consumption planning procedure. In the existing literature, it is assumed that the customer segments are ‘flat’. This means they can be sorted easily during the allocation planning step by a single central planner in decreasing order of profitability. In the subsequent consumption planning phase, if order requests differ in terms of profit margins, companies can render prioritized service in real time to their most profitable customers by consuming the reserved quotas.

As the global population continues to increase, it has become necessary to find ways to handle this increase through various policy tools that address population growth and urbanization problems. The urbanization process has both potential issues and opportunities that need to be exploited to move societies forward. Megacities and Rapid Urbanization: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice examines trends, challenges, issues, and strategies related to population growth and rapid urbanization and its impact on urban environments. The book also explores the use of different governance approaches in addressing challenges and different tools and systems of appropriate allocation to address issues. This publication is an ideal reference source for academicians, students, practitioners, professionals, managers, urban planners, and government officials.

Urban logistics has been a subject of interest to researchers and practitioners for more than 20 years in France and Europe, and more than 40 in the United States. Nevertheless, the subject remains difficult to address by a lack of unification in the definitions and proposed methods but also by what makes its great richness: the diversity of actors and the pluridisciplinarity of the methods and techniques available. This book, which synthesizes more than 10 years of personal research on the subject, but also experience within different teams and projects, intends to bring a unified vision (and more and more followed at the international level) on logistics planning Urban development. It begins with an overview of research in urban logistics and then describes and defines the main components: flows, actors, infrastructures, management components, technologies, regulations and financing actions. A unified vision of these elements as well as the definition of sustainable urban logistics is proposed. Then, the book presents the basics of planning and managing sustainable urban logistics. First, the basics of the before-after analysis are introduced, not only for the experiments but also for the simulation of scenarios. To carry out this type of analysis, two main groups of methods are needed: methods for estimating flows and methods for calculating evaluation indicators. The book presents the main global standards and dominant models for the estimation of the urban freight transport demand, i.e. of freight transport needs in urban areas. Then it presents the methods for estimating and simulating transport and distribution schemes (i.e. transport supply) as well as a proposal for integrated supply-demand modeling. All these methods are presented for immediate application to practitioners, accompanied by summary tables and parameters necessary for their implementation. As far as evaluation is concerned, the book presents a framework for the choice of sustainable indicators and scorecards. Second, the main methods for economic, environmental, social and accessibility assessment are presented. They are accompanied by tables and figures necessary for their implementation. Finally, the main applications of the proposed methods are introduced. The book is meant to be a practical guide to applying the main methods from scientific research to a practical context, and presents examples of quantified and explained application. It is thus the first book that summarizes and presents the main unified methods to help the different decision-makers to implement them in their actions of planning and management of the urban logistics and the transport of goods in town.

This book explores the methodological and application developments of network design in transportation and logistics. It identifies trends, challenges and research perspectives in network design for these areas. Network design is a major class of problems in operations research where network flow, combinatorial and mixed integer optimization meet. The analysis and planning of transportation and logistics systems continues to be one of the most important application areas of operations research. Networks provide the natural way of depicting such systems, so the optimal design and operation of networks is the main methodological area of operations research that is used for the analysis and planning of these systems. This book defines the current state of the art in the general area of network design, and then turns to its applications to transportation and logistics. New research challenges are addressed. Network Design with Applications to Transportation and Logistics is divided into three parts. Part I examines basic design problems including fixed-cost network design and parallel algorithms. After addressing the basics, Part II focuses on more advanced models. Chapters cover topics such as multi-facility network design, flow-constrained network design, and robust network design. Finally Part III is dedicated entirely to the potential application areas for network design. These areas range from rail networks, to city logistics, to energy transport. All of the chapters are written by leading researchers in the field, which should appeal to analysts and planners.