Climate change is the foremost worldwide challenge. Congestion costs the European economy €100 billion per year, 1% of its GDP. Air pollution - the silent killer - affects people’s health. The European Urban Mobility Framework[1] certified that greenhouse gas emissions from transport need to be drastically reduced by 2030, also calling for a harmonisation of Sustainable Urban Logistics Plans with Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans. Priorities of the EU Green Deal[2] - as a blueprint for achievable transformational change - and the EU Mission[3] 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.  

This paper proposes innovative solutions that aim 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 project, co-funded by the European Commission in 2023, 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. The 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. 

The driver is pooling innovation capacity of urban logistics actors, so that the whole sector would be able to unlock 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. DISCO relies on digital evolution over the last 30 years and the recent uberisation and democratisation of transport and logistics services. It 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. 

DISCO intends to interconnect logistics networks without asking operators to change the way they perform; rather, they are asked to adhere to interconnection standards, and implement physical-equivalent of digital Internet. This is 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 is 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; (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 Data Space. 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 Plans[4]. These plans will arrange freight demand and land use by priorities of different city functions 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 are 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).

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/12916-Sustainable-transport-new-urban-mobility-framework_en
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en
[3] https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/funding/funding-opportunities/funding-programmes-and-open-calls/horizon-europe/eu-missions-horizon-europe/climate-neutral-and-smart-cities_en
[4] Freight-Efficient Land Uses: Methodology, Strategies, and Tools (J. Holguin Veras et al) 2021.