Freight Transport and Logistics Assessment: a Model Proposed to Design Performance Indicators and Strategies to Improve Freight Transport Systems at Global and Urban Scale

Transport and logistics have been widely recognized at national and international level as key factors to improve mobility and to provide benefits to individuals and businesses. However they are main responsible for negative impacts towards the environment, which are more significant in urban areas due to the presence of human beings. For this reason, the design of a freight transportation system should be based on a careful design of each component, which should be studied and assessed (ex-ante and ex-post) in terms of its effectiveness with respect to the stakeholders’ needs and objectives. This can be achieved by considering quantitative indicators that enable the manager of the system firstly to understand if the activities are efficient and secondly to make decision aimed at improve the effectiveness of each activity and thus of the whole system. In fact, what can be measured, can be improved. Based on the above considerations, this PhD thesis proposes a model to assess freight transport and logistics performance. In particular, the thesis analyses two important environments: (1) the supply chain environment, based on a firm-perspective; (2) the urban environment, based on a multi-stakeholder perspective. Due to the complexity of the considered systems, which involve different stakeholders with different needs and expectations, two models are proposed. They are designed by considering the same framework based on the same set of performance attributes, but on a different set of key performance indicators. A case-study approach is used to test both models. In the first case, the supply chain of a manufacturer company based in Sardinia is considered. In the second case, the model is tested for both ex-ante and ex- post evaluation by analyzing two case studies: (1) the case of the Urban freight Consolidation Centre (UCC) serving the neighbouring cities of Bristol and Bath, UK (ex-post evaluation); (2) the potential implementation of a UCC serving the city of Cagliari, Italy (ex-ante evaluation). The thesis does not aim to provide a comparison between the two models proposed, but wants to highlight how the effectiveness of a decision process is related to the analysis of the component to be assessed, which are very different depending on the system considered. The proposed models can be a useful tool for decision makers to evaluate their actions and to make decision at strategic, tactical and operational level. An in-depth analysis on city logistics schemes and on the barriers and drivers to their successful implementation is also provided. Considerations about limitations of the application of the proposed models and further research based on the results of this thesis are provided in the conclusions.