Resilience management goes beyond risk management to address the complexities of large integrated systems and the uncertainty of future threats, especially those associated with climate change

This paper starts with the assertion that the way physical objects are currently transported, handled, stored, realized, supplied, and used throughout the world is unsustainable economically, environmentally, and socially. Evidence supporting this assertion is exposed through a set of key unsustainability symptoms. Then, the paper expresses the goal to revert this situation, thus meeting the global logistics sustainability grand challenge. It suggests exploiting the Digital Internet metaphor to develop a Physical Internet vision toward meeting this grand challenge. The paradigm breaking vision is introduced through a set of its key characteristics. The paper then proceeds with addressing the implications and requirements for implementing the Physical Internet vision as a means to meet the grand challenge. It concludes with a call for further research, innovation, and development to really shape and assess the vision and, much more important, to give it flesh through real initiatives and projects so as to really influence in a positive way the collective future. For this to happen, it emphasizes the requirement for multidisciplinary collaboration among and between academia, industry, and government across localities, countries, and continents.

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City Logistics and Physical Internet are two major concepts aiming to profoundly change freight transportation and logistics for increased economic, environmental and societal efficiency and sustainability. They share several basic ideas and are complementary, City Logistics providing the final and last segments of the Physical Internet logistics and transportation networks. We present the first study of the links and synergy between them, introducing the idea of Hyperconnected City Logistics systems and its nine fundamental concepts making up a rich framework for designing efficient and sustainable urban logistics and transportation systems. We conclude with a number of research and innovation challenges.

International audienceLogistic networks intensely use means of transportation and storage facilities to deliver goods. However, these logistic networks are still poorly interconnected and this fragmentation is responsible for a lack of consolidation and thus efficiency. To cope with the seeming contradiction of just-in-time deliveries and challenging emissions targets, a major improvement in supply networks is sought here. This new organisation is based on the universal interconnection of logistics services, namely a Physical Internet where goods travel in modular containers for the sake of interconnection in open networks. If from a logical point of view, merging container flows should improve efficiency, no demonstration of its potential has been carried out prior to the here reported research. To reach this potentiality assessment goal, we model the asynchronous shipment and creation of containers within an interconnected network of services, find the best path routing for each container and minimise the use of transportations means. To carry out the demonstration and assess the associated stakes, we use a set of actual flows from the fast-moving consumer goods sector in France. Various transportation protocols and scenarios are tested, revealing encouraging results for efficiency indicators such as CO2 emissions, cost, lead time, delivery travel time, and so forth. As this is a first work in the field of flows transportation, the simulation model and experiment exposes many further research avenues

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