Research project

CITYLAB: City Logistics in Living Laboratories

Project overview

The CITYLAB project (completed in April 2018) adopted living lab methods (joint stakeholder co-operation and innovation) to test various freight initiatives in the cities of Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Paris, Oslo, Rome and Southampton. 

In Southampton, the overriding objective was to improve air quality along key transport corridors, with the main focus on large municipal organisations such as Southampton General Hospital, Southampton City Council and Southampton’s two universities to investigate opportunities for joint procurement and consolidation of goods to reduce environmental impacts. 

The Southampton Sustainable Distribution Centre at Nursling, operated by project partner Meachers Global Logistics, offered a consolidation service, with take-up from the hospital for temporary storage and transportation of automated dispensing units and planning for consolidation of pharmacy goods transport. 

Consolidations of items delivered to student halls of residence were investigated in case studies although not implemented. 
CITYLAB partner Southampton City Council contributed to air quality concerns by initiating plans to switch a significant proportion of its own-operated vehicle fleet to electric vehicles, and the first six vehicles arrived in January 2018.

Further information is available on the legacy project website 

Staff

Lead researchers

Professor Tom Cherrett

Prof of Logistics and Transport Mgnment

Research interests

  • Understanding and improving the distribution of goods and the management of freight vehicles in urban areas, including the supply of goods to hospitals and the use of consolidation centres; 
  • How optimisation techniques can be used to improve system efficiency and in what ways Intelligent Transport Systems (smart tagging of assets and the use of smartphones) can improve operating efficiency; 
  • Approaches to more effectively collect and manage the movement of waste in terms of both household domestic waste collection strategies, Household Waste Recycling Centre (HWRC) management and joint domestic/commercial waste collection strategies. He has worked on a number of research projects in these specific areas: (Department for Transport grant PPAD 9/142/034, ‘Optimising vehicles undertaking waste collections' GR/S79626/01, SUE project 55 ‘Transport and Logistics'; EP/D043328/1, ‘Green Logistics'.
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Other researchers

Mr Fraser McLeod

Research Fellow

Research interests

  • Transport
  • Freight logistics
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Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups

Research outputs

Thomas Cherrett, Janet Dickinson, Fraser Mcleod, Gavin Bailey, Jason Sit & Gary Whittle, 2017, Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 78, 111-128
Type: article