Hyperconnected urban fulfillment and delivery
Résumé
Urban last-mile delivery faces great challenges to satisfy growing customer demand with faster,
punctual delivery expectations, under tight budgets and environmental requirements. The recently
introduced physical internet (PI) offers a conceptual framework to address these challenges,
overcoming low efficiency of current fragmented logistics operations with seamless asset sharing
and flow consolidation leveraging hyperconnected systems. This article first provides a decision and
system architecture for hyperconnected urban logistics, then investigates its potential at a strategic
level through a simulation-based experiment in the context of large-item delivery. The results
clearly demonstrate the potential of hyperconnected urban logsitics by concurrently improving
often opposing measures: economic efficiency, service capability and sustainability.