The Challenge

Urban freight has a disproportionately high impact on congestion, use of space and emissions, on the rise of last mile operations, which negatively impacts quality of life in cities (WEF 2020), while increasing delivery cost at a level that puts supply chain viability at risk. The sector is atomized, relying on local SMEs or independent workers for this last mile on average 70% of the time. These smaller entities as well as bigger players and other stakeholders in the sector are simply not equipped with the tools, funds and mentality to cope with the operational, business and governance challenges of the situation.

The main challenge for urban logistics is operationalizing multi-part collaboration to cope with the deficit of capillary resources and its atomization. This involves setting the relevant rules, agreements and commercial procedures, with two main factors hamper progressing:

1. Lack of capacity to address the already complex problem of urban freight optimization by multiplying the number of actors involved: agile processing and analysis of large amounts of data, data sharing between different not yet standardised systems.
2. Lack of visibility of all the benefits from collaborating, in particular data valorisation.

The Solution

A main contribution to cope, is focusing on the new information generated to standardise cyclelogistic practises as a critical condition to scale its untapped potential, by generating the EPCIS (Electronic Product Code Information Services) events for last mile distribution using the standard NGSI-LD communication protocol and the FIWARE components for the authorization, access control, communication exchange, publication and monetization of three main services:

• SERVICE1 : an Order Simulation Subscription Service in the I4Trust Marketplace that will be acquired by delivery companies intending to explore collaboration scenarios before adhering a logistics orchestration service and assess the benefits from the delivery plans generated by the relevant App for aligning economic and environmental performances.
• SERVICE2: a Vehicle monitoring Subscription Service that notifies [LastMile] companies, shippers and end customers on the efficiency of using low-to-zero emission vehicles, starting with cargo bikes, through an FIWARE-IoT architecture that senses performance and pollution data with sensors, and process it to compare regarding the baseline of BAU scenarios.
• a Packet Delivery Service in the I4Trust Marketplace to provide information related to the delivered goods, including real time information on major status changes and statistics.

Business projections – scalability

The standardisation of operations and customer relations will allow last mile operators to collaborate and integrate with global supply chains, developing a more competitive offering to their local urban customers and extending commercial reach. More competitive logistic services will also benefit shippers who can translate to their business channel.

New services will have a clear impact on customer business performance and development, fleet management savings and commercial conversion.

The i4Trust Marketplace will allow access to broader relevant data sources (e.g. smart cities public databases) which will in turn increase accuracy and add further functionalities using contextual data. Finally, the visibility of the i4Trust marketplace will showcase more opportunities to monetize data.