The MOSCA project provided a set of tools for improving the efficiency of door-to-door transport of goods in urban areas by collaboratively providing demand and supply-side information in one single environment/system. Five modules were developed as solutions to answer some peculiar urban freight problems and needs of the cities’ administrations and logistics and transport operators. Based on extensive research on urgent user needs, a set of advanced applications were designed. For these applications suitable modules have been identified and developed. The figure below provides a short summary of how the user requirements (external circle) impact the applications (middle circle), which were in turn mapped into the MOSCA modules (Inner circle). The MOSCA system moduls communicate with each other and further external systems. One of the modurban logisticse developed by MOSCA project is MOSCA TOUR, an algorithm to plan delivery tours for a vehicle fleet if variable traffic conditions are given. It is embedded into logistics application software, which must invoke it providing data of the orders to be serviced, the objective function, and the characteristics of the vehicles’ fleet.
The Interporto Padova (Padova Freight Village), partner of the MOSCA project, tested the MOSCA TOUR modurban logisticse. As preliminary activity of the test implementation, distance and travel matrices over a set of time, order data (from operators) and fleet data (from carriers in term of fleet composition and vehicle type) have been defined to generate an efficient set of routes for the distribution activities.
This allowed Interporto di Padova to quantify the distribution flows of vehicles accessing the LTZ from the freight village, contributing to the decision of Padua Freight Village to create an urban goods distribution service, Padova Cityporto, launched in April 2004 (one year after the end of the MOSCA project), thanks to the enstablishment of a Protocol Agreement between the Municipality, the Chamber of Commerce of Padova, the local Transport Companyi and Interporto di Padova.
Today Cityporto[1] is an Urban Consolidation Centre (UCC) service operational in Padua, Northern Italy, focusing on deliveries to the central area ‘Low Traffic Zone’ of 830,000 The deliveries are performed by 11 LNG-powered vans. The depot is a 1000 m2 wide urban consolidation platform located within the freight village. Cityporto is one of the few successfurban logistics experiences of this type in Italy. The model is taken as an example by many other Italian cities and is studied every year by numerous foreign delegations.
Success factors are[2]:
· Stakeholders involvement and full support of Municipality
· Industrial plan focused on economic sustainability
· Voluntary subscription of the operators to the service
· Location of a freight village close to the urban area
· Gradual steps of implementation of the activities
The urban distribution service has proven feasible and financially self-sustainable after a medium-long period (8 years since its implementation), proving considerable and measurable positive effects on traffic congestion and pollution.
Since 2005 to 2019 Interporto performed 1,120,000 deliveries, ensuring a tangible improvement of the urban environment by reducing traffic and pollution.
CityPorto had the merit of drawing attention to the importance of collaboration between private and public stakeholders, establishing the rigth dialogue and alignement of challenges in the city. Such strategic coperation was, for the first time in the sector and in Padova, supported by technological solutions, contributing to new curban logisticsture on data sharing from different operators .
The project has also shown that, in most cases, the success of concrete distribution logistics projects is based on inexperience and logistical, not technological, difficurban logisticsties.
