Sustainable parcel delivery: a decision support tool for the assessment and design of innovative services
The primary objective of the e-LOG project is to create a methodology to assess the environmental impacts of different retail strategies, taking into consideration the origin, mode of transport and the destination of products. The research will be focused on transport in a strict sense. The estimates will be done for the transport of goods from manufacturer to customer, taking into account the different emissions levels for domestic and international transport, including the reverse transport for returns. The different phases of the transport chain will be considered in order to identify and assess the most critical parts of the chain in terms of their adverse effects on emissions. The research plan is structured around three main steps: (a) analysis of the transport needs and operational rules of distinct business models and retail strategies (from the goods leaving the manufacturer to they reach the final customer), and current policies and strategies used in the delivery services defined by national and local regulators; (b) estimative of the levels of air emissions of goods purchased by EU consumers in traditional brick-and-mortar retail or from domestic, cross-border and online marketplaces (such as Amazon); and (c) develop a quantitative and qualitative exploratory analysis of the environmental effect that includes all the phases of the distribution of the goods. The e-LOG project includes: (a) identification of data sources in order to gather primary and secondary data; (b) data collection and integration; (c) qualitative and quantitative analysis of existing data namely by using knowledge discovery techniques; (d) desk research for the analysis of existing documents; (e) exploratory techniques of analysis using in-depth interviews and short, semi-standardized questionnaires; and (f) definition of a set of case studies and scenarios for high-level exploratory assessment of the impact of different business models and operational rules.
