GenCLOn: An ontology for city logistics

City logistics is a discipline specialized to cope with the sustainability problems encountered in urban freight transport. A key characteristic of it is the heterogeneity of the stakeholders involved. Besides the traditional logistics actors such as shippers, carriers and receivers that share consistent interests (i.e. price and quality), city logistics highly respect the interests of public administrators and citizens that care more about the social welfare. To reach an optimal balance between private and public benefit, it is necessary to understand and in turn forecast the behavior pattern of different groups. In recent years, agent-based modeling has been practiced as an unconventional tool to fulfill this task for its strong capability on capturing the dynamic behavior of individual stakeholders and their interconnections. Referring to other domains (e.g. energy system) where the application of agent-based modeling is relatively mature, a following urgency is to achieve interoperability and in turn reusability between models via introducing formal ontology as a shared template with which developers can standardize their models. This paper introduces an initiative of developing an ontology that formalizes the domain knowledge of city logistics.

► This paper introduces a formal ontology aimed to systematically as well comprehensively specify the domain of city logistics. ► City logistics domain is classified into eight general classes which are interconnected by axioms. ► The ontology is validated based on an existing agent-based model and two real life case studies. ► The ontology acts as the template for instance-building and thus can be used as starting point for building agent based model.