GREEN-LOG accelerates systemic changes in last mile delivery ecosystems for economically, environmentally and socially sustainable city logistics. The project establishes city platforms comprising of inclusive stakeholder Urban Living Labs for nurturing social innovation, designing and deploying innovative delivery solutions while allowing the most effective exchange of ideas, the development of robust, harmonized regulatory and policy frameworks, and cooperative business models that build upon effective public/private-sector collaboration and joint investments. The GREEN-LOG approach provides an innovative simulation environment for scenario building combining different solutions that allow the integration of last-mile delivery interventions with the highest possible impact on environmental sustainability and traffic reduction, while considering their financial viability. On the operational level, GREEN-LOG provides cargo-bike based innovations for sustainable micro-consolidation design and deployments, multimodal parcel deliveries integrating public transportation, Logistic as a Service platforms for interconnected city logistics and automated delivery concepts with the use of autonomous vehicles and delivery droids. The solutions are supported by interconnected city logistics dataspaces that feed dynamic services for proactive optimization of the ecosystem, respecting the interests of consumers, businesses and city stakeholders. The approach is deployed and validated in five cities and areas: Athens, Barcelona, Flanders, Oxfordshire and Ispra. Special focus is given on the transferability of the proposed innovation, starting from three follower cities with high interests in tailoring and replicating the GREEN-LOG solutions, and continuing with a pan-European outreach with intensive transfearability accelaration actions, setting the ground for the establishment of multiple city logistics Urban Living Labs.

DISCO will develop and demonstrate - in real-life conditions - a federated European urban freight (UF) data space as one stop shop of data sharing on digital urban logistics solutions and smart tools for ambitious decision making. It will be a continental Ten-T – oriented and distributed real-life ecosystem to prove its value via demonstrated and replicable Use Cases (UCs), build upon innovation drivers to code concrete transformation of urban planning and land use by an open and collaborative UF Data Space with a smart governance model. The DISCO UF Data Space is voluntary based (incentivized), co-created and open framework to achieve a radical transformation and alliance in purpose-oriented data sharing, enabling smart access, fast and resource efficient acquisition, and focused provision, improving knowledge and capacity of city authorities and planners guaranteeing future data availability for dynamic (and predictive) integrated urban logistics planning, synchronizing real-time demand for transport & warehousing with logistics supply, (e.g., as Uber matches the demand for private car transport service with its road drivers’ fleet). DISCO will support European urban logistics players in reducing economic, societal and technical dependence from private digital platforms owned by large global providers, magnifying the scope of a Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) converging to data-driven Sustainable Urban Logistics Planning (SULPs), expanding them beyond traditional urban boundaries (e.g., rural areas, towns and suburbs, cities, and urban areas according to World Urbanization Prospects ) and beyond Covid-19, to optimally manage, monitor and dynamically predict city freight flows, changing urban nodes accessibility by properly serving Functional Urban Area - FUA on a larger, mixed-use, and flexible scale , and deliver advanced and well-informed planning and purpose oriented, optimised land use within a TEN-T and global dimension.

URBANE brings together a multidisciplinary group of 41 partners from 12 different EU Member States, including 12 cities, industry leaders in logistics services, novel solution providers for shared, connected and automated operations and research experts to co-develop novel last mile delivery solutions combining green automated vehicles and shared space utilisation models. The project will support the transition path towards effective, resilient, safe and sustainable last mile transport, through four Lighthouse Living Labs (Helsinki, Bologna, Valladolid and Thessaloniki, that will demonstrate TRL7/8 efficient, replicable and socially acceptable innovative last mile delivery solutions (Wave 1 LLs), building on existing TRL>5 assets. Hands-on lesson learning at European level will be primarily facilitated by an Innovation Transferability Platform comprising Digital Twinning Tools, open models, smart contracts governed by blockchain technology and a data-driven Impact Assessment Radar that will enable the adaptation and replication of Wave 1 solutions in two Twinning LLs in Barcelona and Karlsruhe (Wave 2 LLs), demonstrating their own solutions within the course of the project. URBANE’s commitment to upscaling is further strengthened by the engagement of six early adopters (Follower Cities) in innovations’ adoption feasibility studies, thus stimulating the formulation of new LL communities across Europe. The approach employs social simulation tools to experiment with possible strategies. URBANE will provide evidence of the real introduction of the Physical Internet in urban deliveries for the first time.

Logistics industry is facing continuous and significant challenges during the recent years. The trend is the adoption of intelligent services for increasing the performance of the provided systems and synchromodal operations. Transfers and deliveries can benefit from the use of novel business models that adopt the aforementioned intelligent services when the optimization of the use of shared resources is the core target and become the basis for the provision of a climate friendly infrastructure. The goal of synchromodal operations and the integration of heterogeneous logistics services is the reduction of current transfers in order to reduce the carbon footprint while securing the uninterrupted deliveries and the resilience to any disruptive event. TRACE targets to the aforementioned integration activities offering a universal platform with functionalities related to planning, scheduling, optimization and events management as well as the use of blockchain technology to facilitate the real time conclusion of smart contracts and financial operations, thus, becoming one of the first attempts to provide an ‘intelligent cover’ upon the current logistics frameworks. TRACE envisions real demonstrators in different European countries with different goals that start from transportations with the use of shared resources, the disruptive events detection and re-scheduling of transfers while concluding with the use of unmanned vehicles to automate the last mile deliveries. TRACE also proposes new transfer corridors, safe areas where unmanned vehicles can collect items towards the final destination and new (virtual) hubs. TRACE will perform studies related to the barriers towards the new logistics era, the new business opportunities, the requirements for the legislation and regulatory frameworks and expose the benefits of the proposed approach in terms of the reduction for energy demand and emissions while limiting the operational costs for logistics stakeholders.