ELUD - Urban logistical efficiency of sustainable food (2017)

Summary:

The aim of this project is to offer a methodology providing a framework for simulating scenarios, as well as a set of indicators and tools for evaluating and analysing the sustainable performance of players involved in the logistics and transport of fresh products in order to estimate the sustainability of new urban food delivery systems, particularly to meet a growing demand for ecoresponsible products and services. These methods are built from various, often heterogeneous, sources of available data, such as: (1) data from transport firms, mainly GPS tracking data collected by transport companies and/or these firms' transport plans; (2) city traffic data (available for Greater Lyon in open data format); (3) quantitative data from surveys or produced by scientific models; (4) warehouse or platform data obtained from operating software after anonymisation; (5) additional data (quantitative or qualitative) specific to the type of product and its logistics system from interviews and/or technical documents.
Two phenomena will be studied here:

1. the impact of current fresh product delivery practices on the urban environment and that of new logistics systems to meet ecoresponsible criteria, such as food-hubs and short and local circuits for the delivery of supplies to collective restaurant facilities;
2. the effects of traffic on the potential for optimising delivery rounds using combinatory optimisation algorithms (impact of traffic on transport organisation).

To study these phenomena, the project will develop a methodology to define and simulate food supply scenarios for cities taking these two phenomena into account, as well as one or two examples of their use. The work will be developed and tested by research laboratories on a set of PassionFroid rounds and feedback from Elior, who will make part of their company data available for the purposes of the project and who will take part in various working groups and discussions on the key sustainable performance indicators to prioritise and their application. The contribution of practitioners to the project will not only be limited, therefore, to providing data, but will also involve regular exchanges and active participation in the discussions, as well as in the testing and application of the methods developed. Lastly, work will be carried out to generalise the methodologies proposed for application in other contexts involving the urban transport of fresh products.