DISCO

Climate change is the foremost worldwide challenge. The recent 2021 COP26 Agreement in Glasgow focused on an urgent addressing of such challenges. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) around 40 million people in the 115 largest cities in the EU are exposed to air exceeding WHO air quality guideline values. Congestion costs the European economy €100 billion per year, 1% of its GDP. Air pollution – the silent killer – affects people’s health. The Urban Mobility Framework2 certified that greenhouse gas emissions from transport need to be drastically reduced by 2030, also calling for a harmonisation of SULPs with SUMPs. Priorities of the EU Green Deal3 – as a blueprint for achievable transformational change – and the EU Mission4 goals to reduce climate emissions by 55% by 2030 and for cities to become climate-neutral by 2050, cannot be met only by vehicles decarbonisation targets. In this new transformation, some areas have become obsolete, as their space, services and accessibility no longer meet current needs.

DISCO aims at fast-tracking upscaling to a new generation of urban logistics and smart planning; enabling the transition to decarbonised and digital cities, delivering innovative frameworks and tools, and changing the Urban Logistics and Planning paradigm with a Physical Internet (PI) – led approach. DISCO is a proposal involving the federated community of logistics service providers, mobility and technology providers, real estate and infrastructure owners and cities supported by specialised consulting, EU associations and academics. To this scope, DISCO partners and stakeholders will co-design, deploy, demonstrate, evaluate, and replicate innovative, inclusive, hyperconnected and data-driven urban logistics and planning solutions. The resulting dynamic and optimal space re-allocation, integrating urban freight within an efficiently operated network-of-networks (PI-led), exploiting underused lands and assets, will include both fixed and mobile infrastructure, based on throughput demands. DISCO solutions are designed involving all stakeholders (e.g., cities, logistics service providers, retailers, real estate/public and private infrastructure owners, transport operators, research and technical community, civil society) together driving a paradigm change from sprawl to freight-efficient, zero-emission and nearby-delivery-based models.

In DISCO, we are committed to pooling innovation capacity of urban logistics actors, so that the whole sector would be able to untap a huge amount of data-driven efficiency and sustainability potential, thus generating new values for the Community and unbiased regulation. Central to PI vision, is the true and trusted integration of systems and networks, activated / monitored by any city actively shaping its transition, smoothly integrating freight considerations into land-use policy and planning, leading their inclusion as urban nodes in the context of TEN‐T policy. All DISCO results will also address Sustainable Development Goals – e.g., Goal 11, for “Sustainable cities and communities”, enabling social cohesion between city centres and peripheries, green investments, and new value creation, with upgraded SULPs, to be harmonised in SUMPs. DISCO will implement its innovations to awake hidden assets and optimally use and allocate them – strategically positioning urban and peri-urban lands, and smoothing logistics patterns and freight flows. DISCO will rely on digital evolution over the last 30 years and the recent uberisation and democratisation of transport and logistics services. DISCO will consider mass adoption of devices and new technologies, to smartly connect demand and supply in urban logistics, and it is accessible for all – e.g., as in the discography, moving from vinyl to streaming with digital stores, such as Spotify. This development in urban logistics has significantly reduced distances among smart developers, service providers and consumers and needs for long-haul deliveries. The blending of commerce and ecommerce is driving demand through a seamless “commerce everywhere” experience.

DISCO intends to interconnect logistics networks without asking operators to change the way they perform; rather, they will be asked to adhere to interconnection standards, and implement physical-equivalent of digital Internet. This will be achieved throughout 4 Game Changers (1) Empowering end-to-end visibility across the supply chain in the last miles and fast-tracking transition of digital, physical and economically / socially viable sustainable solutions driven by new technologies, e.g., traffic, parking, access info: This will be done by integrating, interoperable innovations with enabling technologies, by deploying an online PI-led Meta Model Suite with its five “DISCO-X” innovations: DISCOCURB, DISCOPROXI, DISCOBAY, DISCOESTATE and DISCOLLECTION, and its Assessment Toolkit measuring quantitative and qualitative digital transition progress, for a more ambitious urban logistics and planning. The Meta Model Suite will also include framework, tools, tutorials, templates, real-life examples and good practices to help implement, assess, and monitor innovative measures within 5 PI-led Impacts Domains (as in Figure 1); (2) Co-creating an innovative enabling city “cloud” ecosystem for trust and data protection to ensure interoperability and common protocols, valorising secure Urban Freight (UF) data and information, for new value creation, fostering capacity in aligning digital challenges among public/private stakeholders, by deploying a digital Data Space with corresponding services and its Connectors Store. This will enable trusted stakeholder-wide and voluntary based data sharing (in local communities) and perform demonstrations, with anonymised and customised data pipelines supporting such services, capacity building, and the increased social acceptance. (3) Driving cities in effectively delivering new urban logistics sustainable planning: Poly-parametric city typology as Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) will be adopted to link city centres and peripheries with mixed and optimal space distribution and of lands uses. Cities residential, commercial & mixed, industrial areas will be combined to develop Urban Freight-Efficient Land Uses Servicing and Delivery Plans5. These plans will arrange freight demand and land use by priorities of different city functions (FUAs) with real-time optimization of freight flows and assets, linked to data ecosystems with standards / protocols for data collection and innovative mutualised data exchange; (4) Fast-tracking adoption and replication of innovative business models, based on participatory, data driven and sharing principles among private/public players stimulating an active executive collaboration model to generate new market and values. DISCO’s ground-breaking results will be deployed and demonstrated running on a 3-Steps implementation process lifecycle, for upscaling to ambitious sustainable planning, involving 4+4 Demonstrators (building on existing TRL > 5 solutions): 4 leading cities, Starring Living Labs, Copenhagen (DK), Ghent (BE), Thessaloniki (EL), and Helsinki (FI) (Step 1), 4 replication cities, Twinning Living Labs, Padua (IT), a Spanish Cluster with Barcelona, Valencia, and Zaragoza (ES) (Step 2), and 4 Early Adopters, Followers, Prague (CZ), Piacenza (IT), Aarhus (DK) and North Hesse (DE) (Step 3). They span North to South and East to West along TEN-T corridors, supporting the revised guidelines for the TEN-T, which states that EU cities on the network should adopt a SUMP harmonised with SULP, and collect relevant data. Seven out of 8 LLs are in the list of EU Mission cities. DISCO will support them with a Policy package to achieve the EU Mission goals for inclusive climate-neutral smart cities by 2030. DISCO will demonstrate socially and economically viable solutions of forward-looking urban logistics and planning at different ranges of European city geographies and ambitions, distinctive and settled urban and peri-urban system and hierarchies, with Thessaloniki (Demonstration) and Prague (Follower) located in areas experiencing rapid economic and social change.

The DISCO consortium composition ensures an efficient development, demonstration, and evaluation of data-driven measures, aiming at upscaling urban logistics and planning towards PI-led approach, through the participation of the public sector (cities & regions), private sector (LSPs, transport operators, real estate/infrastructure owners, technology providers and business innovators), research canters, with EU relevant associations involved as consortium members: POLIS (cities/regions), ALICE (logistics), EPA (parking) and IDSA (data), and a team of experts, acting as multiplier in the Impact Creation Board for Transformation, maximising the project impact even beyond its completion.