Investigating the theoretical cost-relationships of urban consolidation centres for their users

Urban consolidation centres (UCCs) are a popular measure in city logistics. Although there are numerous pilot projects and test cases, many UCCs are granted only a short life because they fail to attract a sufficient number of customers. Evidence from literature shows that the cost-attractiveness of UCC solutions for their users plays a major importance in their decision to use these facilities. Indeed, since UCCs involve additional service costs for their customers, in order to be financially attractive, they must demonstrate their ability to decrease delivery costs further in the transport chain, through distance or time gains. Despite the significant interest of the practitioners and the research community in these facilities, there is a lack of knowledge and quantitative tools for assessing the costs of delivery operations and the potential savings by use of UCCs. In this paper, authors propose an analytical approach to estimating costs of deliveries with and without the UCC based on the description of the logistics behaviour of the urban stakeholders from the literature. The analytical framework is then applied to a case of a UCC servicing Brussels. The study shows that the main costs of deliveries are time-related costs and that the use of the UCC can indeed decrease them. The main elements that influence the cost attractiveness of the UCCs are the characteristics of a delivery operations (e.g. number of stops, average number of cargo units per stop or the type of actor who performs the delivery), the characteristics of the UCC (e.g. its location, the service price or the possibility of overnight deliveries) and the characteristics of the services area (e.g. size of the town or delivery density).