Cities continuously build and renovate. While these works are essential for attractive, sustainable and economically viable urban areas on the long-run, the construction phase generates vast volumes of material deliveries, often with heavy vehicles, fragmented schedules and limited coordination. These flows create a “planning gap” between urban development, traffic planning and construction logistics: cities can plan what they want to build, but often cannot predict and anticipate the transport, emission and health impacts during the works.
This FWO Senior Postdoctoral project develops methods to close that gap. First, it will build a model to predict construction transport demand on building and city scales, allowing to include construction transport in urban freight models. Second, it will assess how spatiotemporal delivery flexibility -such as shifting deliveries to wider time windows or rerouting around exposure hotspots- can reduce vehicle-kilometres, emissions and population exposure. This will be linked to dynamic health-impact modelling that accounts for where people are throughout the day, rather than only where they live. Third, the project studies how contractors, suppliers, logistics operators and public authorities can collaborate across operational, tactical and strategic planning levels.
Academically, the project is embedded at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Universiteit Hasselt (Belgium), with research exchanges at Linköping University (Sweden), the University of Toronto (Canada) and Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands). The project will be tested and validated in close collaboration with 19 international public and private partners, incl. Shipit Multimodal Logistics, Buildwise, Embuild, Les Chercheurs d’air, Stad Mechelen, Brussels Mobility, Brussel Leefmilieu/Renolution, perspective.brussels, Alrik, Myloc, BRAL, POLIS, TechLink, BPC Group, FEMA/FEPROMA, Haven van Brussel, GS1 BeLux, De Vlaamse Waterweg and Volvo Group.
The project contributes to VUB-Mobilise’s sustainable logistics research by helping cities and industry move from zero-emission ambitions towards zero-impact urban construction logistics.
Contact person: Dr. Nicolas Brusselaers (Nicolas.Brusselaers@vub.be)