Systems Science for selecting urban freight solution: Application to La Rochelle

Abstract

The distribution of goods in the urban centres is essential for their prosperity. The experiences for optimising the transport of goods in cities are numerous. Most of them concentrate on the transport of traditional goods (without being concerned with an activity in particular), the others on the contrary are related to a precise sector (fresh products etc.). All these experiments are undertaken independently without taking into account the total organization of Goods Distribution (GD) inside the city. In this case, comes the role of the community as an organiser or conductor of these different flows. In this article, we focus on the cities of medium size that offer a particular context for the GD: the urban specificities play a relevant role on the dynamics of the flow of goods. In this framework, we develop a global approach whose objective is to improve GD in these cities. This approach is based on the urban specificities and suggests to communities a choice of potentially efficient actions to be applied. The proposed methodology considers two physical specificities of the city: the distribution of places concerned by the logistic activities and the distribution of places facilitating the transit of goods. Its principle rests on the concept of entropy for obtaining a representation of disorder related to logistic activities. Finally, we describe this approach by focusing on the experiments in development in the agglomeration of La Rochelle (FRANCE) under the cadre of European project SUCCESS of CIVITAS program.