CORDIS

Urban Freight Transport (UFT) faces the challenge of timely goods distribution and improved service allocation performance with minimal environmental impacts. Stakeholders involved in UFT system have an inadequate picture and understanding of the urban freight environment and how this changes. Thus the planning and implementation of solutions is inefficient and has weak impact on the problems. NOVELOG Project aims to enable knowledge and understanding of freight distribution and service trips by providing guidance for implementing effective and sustainable policies and measures. This guidance will help the cities establish stakeholder involvement and collaboration in policy making. These Multi-Stakeholder Platforms will support the cities in selecting suitable and sustainable solutions for urban freight and service transport and help cities with the development and transfer of best governance and business models.
The specific objectives of NOVELOG are:
1.To understand, assess and capture current needs and trends on UFT, revealing the reasons of the failures in city logistics implementations and to identify the key influencing factors of city logistics and develop future Sustainable Urban logistics Scenarios.
2.To enable determination of optimum policies and measures, based on the city typologies and objectives, link them to tailored business models of city logistics solutions and test and validate them on selected, representative city cases.
3.To develop a modular integrated evaluation framework for city logistics which will portray the complexity of the life cycle of UFT systems in terms of divergent stakeholders’ interests, conflicting business models and implement it to assess the effectiveness of the policies and measures on specific city contexts.
4.To incorporate the best fitting policies and measures in integrated urban planning and Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP) at local level, focusing on, facilitating and guiding multi-stakeholder cooperation for improved policy making
5.To field test, implement and validate all the above in selected European cities and thus demonstrate applicability and sustainability of NOVELOG tools (see WP5, WP6 and WP7) and to ensure the continuity of the project’s impacts by creating and establishing take-up strategies and roadmaps for the best city logistics solutions.

NOVELOG's silent scope is to provide guidance on: 1) supporting the choice of the most optimal and applicable solutions to improve urban freight transport and delivery services; 2) facilitating stakeholder collaboration; 3) developing and testing measuers on the field, as well as transferring best governance and business models.
This has been achieved through:
1) the targeted understanding of urban freight and service trips, fostered by data collection by each NOVELOG city based on a detailed NOVELOG Framework for Data, Information and Knowledge Collection for Urban Freight and Service Demand Understanding.
2)the implementation of six pilot cases and six case studies examining several innovative city logistics solutions such as: multimodality for urban freight, micro distribution with Cargo bikes, Electric vehicles in last mile distribution, Intelligent Transport Systems for UFT monitoring and planning, Urban Consolidation Centers, Freight networks development.
3) the development and application of a modular, integrated, Evaluation Framework for the assessment of a combined set of measures;
4) the holistic assessment of each Novelog pilot and case study on a sustainability level.
5) the development of the NOVELOG Integrated inventory of policies and measures, typology between cities and potential city logistics components;
6) the development of the NOVELOG multi-stakeholder platform and
7) the provision of guidance to cities through the development of:
o innovative cooperative business models
o integration strategies and roadmaps
o specific guidelines on implementing Sustainable Urban Logistics Plans (NOVELOG SULP Guidelines)
o the NOVELOG Yellow Pages, a web guide to public authorities on city logistics frequently asked questions.
These activities have been accompanied by the production of the NOVELOG tools that are expected to support the take-up impact of NOVELOG project to wider international city and industrial networks and beyond the project’s lifetime.
1) The Novelog Understanding the cities tool: This tool aims to provide a starting point for the various stakeholders, to realize interrelations beyond their own environment; identify the key influencing factors of UFT demand & supply and their expected impact on the UFT characteristics, through a stakeholders participatory approach; serve as an ongoing platform at the city level, for building a common view among stakeholders on the UFT environment and reaching consensus on the critical issues to be addressed.,
2) The Novelog Toolkit: This tool aims to enable a city to identify measures, typology and impacts, in an accessible and repeatable fashion. The tool uses the findings of the previous work of NOVELOG to provide suitable measures and interventions to cities based on the City’s specific typology.
3) NOVELOG Evaluation Tool: This tool was designed to help NOVELOG cities (city cases and network cities) to assess measures that are designed to provide sustainable urban freight distribution. The Evaluation Tool enables the comparison of implemented measures or/and planned measures by using data that are obtained by observation of modelling, respectively.
4) NOVELOG Impact assessment Guidance Tool. This tool can be used by cities to develop business models for UFT solutions, as well as to integrate it with their existing SUMPs.

The NOVELOG Tools can be reached through this link: www.uct.imet.gr

The project achievements have been broadly disseminated through:
-the development of Multistakeholder Platforms,
-the organization of several workshops,training sessions & special sessions in conferences
-the contribution to scientific and non-scientific journals and conferences,
-the publishing of electronic and printed dissemination material (newsletters, leaflets, factsheets, posters e.tc.)
-the organization of the NOVELOG Final Conference
-the development of a NOVELOG video
-synergies with other EU projects.

In the frame of the 3 year project's lifetime , Novelog project achieved to:
1) improve the understanding of cost effective strategies, measures and tools for achieving zero emission city logistics in urban centers by 2030, through the development of the NOVELOG Tools and guidance documents and roadmaps.
2)have a direct impact in archiving increased load factors and reduced vehicle movements in cost and emission benefits through the implementation and testing of 7 pilot cases and 6 case studies.
3)have a major effect in practical guidance for better integrating city logistics in urban policies by developing several guidance documents and tools such as: the NOVELOG Guidance Tool, the Novelog Roadmap, the NOVELOG SULP Guidelines, the NOVELOG Yellow Pages (FAQs)
4)take-up and rollout of the project results and contribution to EU policy implementation through the development of Multistakeholder Platforms, the organization of several workshops, the participation in plethora of EU events and conferences e.tc.