Älykäs kaupunkilogistiikka – CityLog

During the spring of 2014 Transport Research Centre Verne from the Tampere University of
Technology carried out an urban logistics study, where the current challenges and future
development needs of city logistics was studied. In the study, this problem is approached from
the perspective of shops and services located into the city centre. A part of the inner city
centre of Tampere was chosen as a case area of the study. The main research methods were
survey and expert interviews.
According to the results, the biggest challenges in the city logistics from the perspective of shop
and service office owners are narrow loading and unloading areas, problems related on
delivery time schedules and minor possibilities to affect logistics actions. In general, lack of
communication and the sharing of information are seen be poorly used in the city logistics.
However, retailers and service carries do not see logistics as their weakness nor their main
business area. According to the findings, in future the development of city logistics should be
done more with a close relationship with transportation companies and the public sector.
The future research and development needs should focus on communication between
transport companies and their customers, optimization of loading and unloading areas and the
impacts of rapidly increasing e-commerce. Highly automated and real-time communication
solutions could offer significant benefits for unconsciousness in delivery times for example.
Also the potential of underground logistics connections should be studied together with
loading and unloading optimization.