On 18-20 October 2023, the VREF conference on city freight was organized for the fifth time. The event was organized by the Urban Freight Platform and the focus was on presenting future urban freight transport research, what opportunities and challenges are there?
Summary of the program
Day 1 featured about 45 posters and 21 lectern presentations of frontier research developed by researchers from more than 20 different countries in sessions relating to the following topics:
- Urban Comodality
- Equity in urban logistics
- Stakeholders engagement
- Sustainable urban planning
- User-centric last mile urban logistics
- New technologies in urban logistics
Day 2 and 3 looked into opportunities and challenges ahead, during these days invited presentations, workshops, panels and break-out sessions discussed how to strengthen the links between research and implementation.
Some of the key topics of these 2 days are:
- New ways to manage urban space for freight transport and logistics
- Better kerbside management - solving conflicts and recent developments
- Service trips: What do we know and how can we find out more?
- Urban freight and issues of equity, justice and accessibility
- Using visualisation and storytelling in urban freight transport research
- Freight and urban planning in times of dramatic change
- Future developments in urban freight transport
- Urban logistics and the circular economy
- New business models in the face of new needs and challenges
- From research to implementation in urban freight transport - key developments and the way ahead
- Questions of governance related to urban freight transport and logistics
- Hubs and consolidation opportunities: Where next and who is leading?
- Improving event logistics as part of sustainable urban freight (event logistics includes deliveries related to exhibitions, concerts, sporting events etc.
The conference featured a wide range of confirmed and invited speakers and workshop/break-out session leaders/facilitators.
Material from the conference
Presentations and posters from the conference can be found in this Google Drive folder.
All abstracts that were presented at the conference can be found in the Book of Abstracts.
Organizer
The Urban Freight Platform (UFP) is an initiative supported by Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF) on urban freight research based in Gothenburg, Sweden. The UFP works as a facilitator of academic research on urban freight within the context of the logistics competence centre Northern LEAD at the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology.
