Abstract

Freight transport in urban areas is one of the many challenging domains that cities have to manage. E-commerce and omni-channel services have fragmented the flow of deliveries, and the variety of modes of transport used for freight has expanded significantly. This development has created new concerns about increased nuisance to citizens, shortage of space for service providers, and reduced access to services for vulnerable groups. City authorities are looking for new ways to curb problems, anticipating on emerging trends and considering policy options, together with all relevant stakeholders. Digital twins of cities are promising tools to support this process. Their use to manage city liveability and efficiency is becoming increasingly common, and digital twinning technology is developing fast. The ambition of this chapter is to take stock of recent research developments on digital twins for city logistics in order to construct a narrative about key directions of innovation. We review the results of 3 recent projects that have chosen very different directions for innovation, related to data ingestion and simulation, to flexible use of models and to cross-domain twinning. Together, we argue, they form the cornerstones for an innovation roadmap for digital twins in city logistics.

Önder Gürcan

Senior Researcher

My research interests include multi-agent systems, collective intelligence, self-organization and self-adaptation, simulation of biological systems, distributed clock synchronization and behavioural economics.