The Sustainability Dimensions in Intelligent Urban Transportation: A Paradigm for Smart Cities

Abstract

The transportation sector has traditionally been considered essential for commercial activities, although nowadays, it presents clear negative impacts on the environment and can reduce social welfare. Thus, advanced optimization techniques are required to design sustainable routes with low logistic costs. Moreover, these negative impacts may be significantly increased as a consequence of the lack of synergy between the sustainability objectives. Correspondingly, the concept of transport optimization in smart cities is becoming popular in both the real world and academia when public decision making is lit by operations research models. In this paper, however, we argue that the level of urban smartness depends on its sustainability and on the level of information and communication technologies developed in the city. Therefore, the operations research models seek to achieve a higher threshold in the sustainable transport standards in smart cities. Thus, we present a generic definition of smart city, which includes the triple bottom line of sustainability, with the purpose of analyzing its effects on city performance. Finally, this work provides a consolidate study about urban freight transport problems, which show that sustainability is only one facet of the diamond of characteristics that depict a real smart city.

Los indicadores de Desempeño de la Distribución Urbana de Mercancías: Un Análisis Bibliométrico

“…El Balanceo de Ruta indica la distribución justa de la carga de trabajo de los empleados entre vehículos en operaciones de entrega, optimizando rutas y tareas para prevenir fatiga y agotamiento [9]. Por otro lado, se evaluó la posibilidad de reducción de la carga de trabajo de los conductores, lo cual permite la realización de entregas simultáneas y la paralelización de tareas [62].…”

“…En Estados Unidos, este aumento en la actividad de transporte ha suscitado preocupaciones económicas y medio ambientales entre las que se encuentran el aumento de las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero en un 24%, situando al sector como el principal contribuyente a las emisiones en comparación con otros sectores [6], y, además, el elevado costo del transporte en la última milla dentro de la cadena de suministro [7,8]. Este panorama ha motivado la necesidad de abordar el impacto ambiental asociado [9], las externalidades negativas generadas por el movimiento de mercancías en entornos urbanos, y aliviar la congestión vehicular en estas áreas [10], que mejoren la eficiencia en las operaciones de transporte considerando las partes interesadas involucradas y la importancia de abordar estos desafíos en términos de ciudades sostenibles e inteligentes.…”

Barriers related to the implementation of intelligent transport systems in cities - the Polish local government’s perspective

“…In the above context, intelligent transportation greatly impacts the possibility of a city being smarter. According to Reyes-Rubiano et al (2021), interrelationships between a smart city and transportation are noticeable because some authors consider that the smart city favours smart transport, while others consider that without intelligent transportation, there would not be any smart city. Currently, stable urban mobility and efficient passenger transport cannot be guaranteed without integrating modern technological and organisational solutions in transportation with the management of the urban transport network (Tzvetkova, 2018).…”

Optimizing Last-Mile Delivery: A Multi-Criteria Approach with Automated Smart Lockers, Capillary Distribution and Crowdshipping

“…In reality, millions of parcels the United States of America vanish or become stolen on a daily basis [27]. Taking into account the consumer's option to purchase or not purchase a drop box for the online delivery of packages, it can be called a process of collaborative creation, which is common in both online and traditional commerce, with the consumer's co-creation of supply chain [28]. This study investigates the viability [29,30] of deploying drop boxes, an alternative delivery system, to reduce retailer financial and reputation costs while increasing consumer confidence in direct ordering.…”