scholarly journals Slovenia on the Way to Drone Delivery - What More Needs to be Done

Author(s):  
Kristijan Perčič ◽  
Branka Leskovšek

Nowadays, it is impossible to bypass the fact that digitization, robotics and automation of work are becoming an increasingly important part of our living and business. It becomes crucial, especially in urban areas, to identify new operational models that could be applied for last mile deliveries, where increasing of city logistics sustainability is being the main goal. Drones have been widely acknowledged as a promising technology in many fields and industries, especially for the delivery of medical and aid packages in humanitarian and healthcare logistics. In this study, we present the project of Post of Slovenia, which aimed to implement first delivery drone to the fleet to access hard-to-access locations. Slovenian Post aims to create innovative, cost-efficient and market-led business environment for the development and take-up of new drone services and technologies within the Slovenian’s internal market. As the national legislation in this area is still relatively unregulated, Post of Slovenia has actively contacted with the national authorities, which are the drafters of the relevant legislation, in order to accelerate the introduction of delivery drones into Slovenian airspace.

Author(s):  
T. M. Özbekler ◽  
A. Karaman Akgül

Abstract. As current cities are attributed to particular dynamism consists of population density and increased urbanization, urban areas are facing some challenges for city logistics, both in terms of economic, environmental, and social impact. Especially, the debates over last-mile logistics are arising with inefficiencies in delivery cost (half truckload on delivery) and delivery time per parcel (unnecessary waiting-load periods at multiple stops) while inner-urban areas are especially suffered from traffic congestion, emission, and noise pollution. In this regard, smart cities as a concept with the potential to produce sustainable solutions to urban problems bring along with the need for innovative urban logistics systems to make conventional distribution channels of the city up to date. The key objective tackled in this paper can be defined as the identification of the city logistics schemes with highlighting current approaches in smart cities. The study adopts a systemic approach based on the typology of consolidation-distribution schemes in city logistics to define the feasibility of micro logistics initiatives from the scope of the smart city consisting of mobility, sustainability, and liveability. Thanks to a detailed examination of city logistics dynamics, this study can contribute theoretically to smart city logistics literature as well as practically the logistics sector.


2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 22-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivan Cardenas ◽  
Yari Borbon-Galvez ◽  
Thomas Verlinden ◽  
Eddy Van de Voorde ◽  
Thierry Vanelslander ◽  
...  

Supply chains, logistics and freight have been facing increasingly complex challenges posed by transitions in economic structures, urbanization, city design and transport systems, as well as by the externalities associated with logistics activities in urban areas. This has driven a great deal of research recently. Yet, there are no sufficient contributions clarifying the current state of thought in this field. This article critically reviews the literature highlighting current approaches in the field. The objective of the article is threefold. First, to provide a framework with geographical and functional elements of urban logistics. Second, to identify the scope of the literature, vested into a typology. And third, to define the terms that may embrace the various analytical interests of the urban logistics field, namely city logistics, urban goods distribution and last mile logistics. The aim is to contribute to organize the current and future thought in the field of urban logistics.


Smart Cities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 1058-1086
Author(s):  
Franklin Oliveira ◽  
Daniel G. Costa ◽  
Luciana Lima ◽  
Ivanovitch Silva

The fast transformation of the urban centers, pushed by the impacts of climatic changes and the dramatic events of the COVID-19 Pandemic, will profoundly influence our daily mobility. This resulted scenario is expected to favor adopting cleaner and flexible modal solutions centered on bicycles and scooters, especially as last-mile options. However, as the use of bicycles has rapidly increased, cyclists have been subject to adverse conditions that may affect their health and safety when cycling in urban areas. Therefore, whereas cities should implement mechanisms to monitor and evaluate adverse conditions in cycling paths, cyclists should have some effective mechanism to visualize the indirect quality of cycling paths, eventually supporting choosing more appropriate routes. Therefore, this article proposes a comprehensive multi-parameter system based on multiple independent subsystems, covering all phases of data collecting, formatting, transmission, and processing related to the monitoring, evaluating, and visualizing the quality of cycling paths in the perspective of adverse conditions that affect cyclist. The formal interactions of all modules are carefully described, as well as implementation and deployment details. Additionally, a case study is considered for a large city in Brazil, demonstrating how the proposed system can be adopted in a real scenario.


2021 ◽  
Vol 131 ◽  
pp. 105248
Author(s):  
Emrah Demir ◽  
Daniel Eyers ◽  
Yuan Huang
Keyword(s):  

Significance National GDP nevertheless contracted by just 1.5% in 2020 -- less than almost any other country in Latin America. Resilient remittances and exports, coupled with unprecedented policy support, have mitigated the effects of the pandemic and subsequent containment measures, leaving the country better placed for recovery than its neighbours. Impacts Enduring poverty, inequality and violent crime, and the impacts of accelerating climate change, will drive further migration from Guatemala. The government will pursue banking law reforms, to reduce risks to financial activities in the post-pandemic business environment. Infighting and corruption scandals will hinder the opposition's ability to benefit from the decline of the president's popularity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 097226292110432
Author(s):  
Kshitija Pandey ◽  
Kala Mahadevan ◽  
Sujata Joshi

The COVID-19 outbreak has impacted the global business environment and has resulted in significantly challenging multiple industries across the business spectrum. One of the industries facing severe adverse consequences is the travel and tourism industry. This study aims to assess and assimilate the overall impact posed by this pandemic to the Indian tourism industry and propose a sustainable recovery framework that would provide a guideline to all the Indian tourism industry stakeholders to forge the way forward in the post-pandemic era. The study adopts a narrative literature review-based approach to arrive at a sustainable recovery framework based on the analysis and evaluation of the literature on the proposed topic. The study finds that the Indian tourism industry has been significantly impacted by the ongoing pandemic and has altered the functioning of all the stakeholders in the industry.


2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-13
Author(s):  
Jelena Simićević ◽  
Vladimir Molan ◽  
Nada Milosavljević

Sustainable parking management in central urban areas typically involves implementation of restrictive parking measures. Discouraged by parking measures users seek for an alternative option. Some of them self-initiatively found a way not to completely abandon driving: they drive and park outside the central area and reach the final destination by public transport. This travel pattern is known as “informal Park-and-Ride“ (PnR), and should be estimated as relatively positive because the critical “last mile” is travelled by public transport. As PnR demand grows, policy-makers should consider its formalisation and integration into the urban transport policy. This paper aims to identify informal PnR users in Belgrade and to investigate their motives, requests and preferences towards this option. The findings should be of importance when planning and developing formal PnR sites, which can largely increase user willingness to accept restrictive parking measures, i.e. to adopt more sustainable travel behaviour.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yannick Back ◽  
Fabian Funke ◽  
Peter Marcus Bach ◽  
Joao Paulo Leitao ◽  
Wolfgang Rauch ◽  
...  

<p>In the face of rapid urban and population growth and with climate change altering precipitation patterns, urban water management is becoming increasingly demanding. Numerous software, tools and approaches to study urban water flow behaviour and model hydrological processes exist. However, the understanding of water movement in urban areas, especially during extreme events, and the physical principles behind them, as well as the interaction between the natural and the urban hydrological cycle is still incomplete. For decades, models suited for urban hydrological analysis greatly impacted the improvement of flood protection, public health and environmental protection, changing the way we look at urban water and stormwater management. In order to calculate accurate quantities of runoff in any rainfall/runoff model, information about urban sub-catchment characteristics plays an important role. Size, shape, topography, as well as land use influencing infiltration rates and evapotranspiration, are of great importance to calculate accurate runoff quantities on the urban scale. New implementations to reduce runoff towards the sewer system, such as decentralised stormwater techniques, increase the urgent need for accurate and high-resolution local/neighbourhood-scale information. Spatial and temporal developments require water management models to be connected with GIS (Geographical Information Systems). Initially not being developed to interact with each other, multiple approaches exist to combine GIS with water management models. Nevertheless, defining urban sub-catchments for rainfall-runoff modelling is often still performed manually using specific maps or using simple surface partitioning algorithms such as the Thiessen polygons. A significant disadvantage in generating urban sub-catchments manually is the fact that natural surface inclination is usually not considered, influencing the size and shape of the delineated sub-catchments. So far, only a few studies have devoted attention to improving the way urban sub-catchments are delineated and the information about their surface characteristics is generated. This study evaluates a GIS-based approach to automatically delineate urban sub-catchments accounting for the location of nodes (actual manholes or drain inlets) as sub-catchment outlets. In order to compare the influence of the sub-catchment delineation methods (1 to 3), we use (1) a digital surface model (DSM) and (2) a digital elevation model (DEM) to automatically delineate the urban sub-catchments and compare these two methods with each other as well as with (3) already manually derived sub-catchments of a specific case study. Furthermore, we compare hydraulic simulation results from the software SWMM with measured flow data to infer the most accurate sub-catchment delineation method.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Numair Sulehri ◽  
Imran Dar ◽  
Sajjad Hussain

Abstract The purchase patterns have been shifted from tangibles to societal orientations, where religious orientation is the way forward for sustainable purchase behavior in expanding urban areas of a middle-income country. The ethical and responsiveness considerations through the connection between Islamic religious orientation (IsRO), purchase intention (PI), and total psychological contract (TPsC) is a research gap projected to be filled from multiple dimensions. Captivating the purchase intention and total psychological contract as mediating variables and analytical approach for religious orientation on purchase behavior constructed in the present research. The empirical assessment was executed through Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach based on the cross-sectional research design. There were 669 participants selected from large superstores, with ages ranging from 16 to 55 (M=3.38, SD=1.06), from Islamabad and Rawalpindi in Pakistan, from September 2018 to March 2019. The findings revealed that religious orientation level positively enhanced customer purchase behavior, purchase intention and psychological contract in organized retail stores and psychological contract played a mediating role in the influencing on the purchase behavior; whereas, the purchase intention also played a mediating role between religious orientation and customer purchase behavior. Therefore, the religious orientation stimulated a higher level of purchase behavior since it favored of the higher level of psychological contract and purchase intention in organized retail store customer. The study highlighted the value of cognitive and moral processes and psychological needs could be one of the crucial factors for improvement of perceptual change in terms of purchase behavior of retail consumers that connect psychological dimension with suitability indicators of being responsiveness and ethical consideration sourced from religious orientation. The implications pave the way forward for product development, purchase strategies, and retail market sensing for corporate retail chains and government utility stores for ethical business processes. Meanwhile, the government and enterprises need to strengthen the popularization and dissemination of environmental protection and food safety knowledge to enhance consumers’ environmental and food safety awareness, improving the social environment of the cultivation of the organic food market.


2020 ◽  
pp. 097215091988979 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dhirendra Prajapati ◽  
Arjun R Harish ◽  
Yash Daultani ◽  
Harpreet Singh ◽  
Saurabh Pratap

This study considers the fresh food city logistics that involves the last-mile distribution of commodities to the customer locations from the local distribution centres (LDCs) established by the e-commerce firms. In this scenario, the last-mile logistics is crucial for its speed of response and the effectiveness in distribution of packages to the target destinations. We propose a clustering-based routing heuristic (CRH) to manage the vehicle routing for the last-mile logistic operations of fresh food in e-commerce. CRH is a clustering algorithm that performs repetitive clustering of demand nodes until the nodes within each cluster become serviceable by a single vehicle. The computational complexity of the algorithm is reduced due to the downsizing of the network through clustering and, hence, produces an optimum feasible solution in less computational time. The algorithm performance was analysed using various operating scenarios and satisfactory results were obtained.


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