A New Concept for Urban Logistics Delivery Area Booking

This paper presents a research project named ALF (Aires de Livraison du Futur, Next Generation Delivery Areas). The project's purpose is to increase the use of delivery areas by prior booking by professional delivery operators, and make dynamic adjustment of their booking, if necessary. Information technologies with mobile communicating devices and in-roadway sensors are used in front of the information management process system. In this paper, the general context and the methodology used to handle the problem are introduced in a first part. The second part discusses the system architecture and the human interactions that allow users to book a delivery area for a given period. The third part describes the computational process allowing the delivery rounds preparation, with a solution based on distributed negotiation between multi-agents representing the delivery operators. The way this system allows dynamic adjustments of the proposed rounds is also described. The conclusion summarises main configurations of the system and lists innovative services which could be added to delivery areas and allow more efficiency for sustainable development of the cities.