Ressource Allocation in City Logistics with Demand Uncertainty – ADELE

The freight transportation in cities is a major disturbing factor to urban life in terms of congestion, pollution, safety and security. A central issue in city logistics (CL) is to design logistics systems that move goods to, from, and within urban areas while meeting sustainability goals. Such CL systems are generally based on new business models based on cooperation among stakeholders, resource sharing, consolidation, synchronization of operations, multi and intermodality . In ADELE we address a planning problem faced by an orchestrator managing a CL system. An orchestrator is the stakeholder of public or private nature that operates and organizes a CL system when multiple parties and stakeholders are implied.
In ADELE, we tackle a planning problem faced by the orchestrator in coordinating and managing the resources offered by the freight transporters which can be carriers or logistics service providers. We call this problem : the Allocation Resource Problem in city logistics with Demand Uncertainty (ARPDU). A key feature of the ARPDU is that demand, i.e. the quantities and the destinations of particular products to be handled, is uncertain. The ARPDU aims to determine what logistics facilities should be used and when and where the vehicles of the carriers should be assigned to cover the demand in the most efficient way. In ADELE, we consider two main variants of the ARPDU depending whether the CL system is one tier or two tiers. The ARPDU aims to optimize a multi-objective function according to the three dimensions of sustainability.
ADELE aims at developing new efficient mathematical models and decision support methods for the ARPDU. The underlying methodology is the design and implementation of ad-hoc optimization algorithms based on mathematical modeling.