Smart Urban Logistics (eBook)

Last-mile delivery in cities, where the main problems are the traffic situation and ensuring access to customers' homes while maintaining their privacy, poses a substantial logistical challenge. This book explores how the service area of mobility, especially last-mile delivery, can be improved and smartified. It demonstrates how a design science method and a transdisciplinary approach have been used to create a traffic area analysis tool that can accommodate the uncertainty and incompleteness of geospatial data; a linguistic traffic merging tool; and a customer classifier. In terms of developing the optimization artifacts, the socio-economic and logistical aspects of cities were considered and fuzzy logic and nature-inspired swarm intelligence (fuzzy ant colony optimization) were applied as basic principles.

Jhonny Pincay Nieves earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He has worked for Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL University) and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (Ecuador) as a lecturer and researcher. He currently works as data scientist at Viasuisse AG in Biel, Switzerland. His research interests include smart cities and logistics, fuzzy logic, recommender systems, and software engineering.