Urban Radar has come to AI4Cities Phase 2 with a solution called CityForward, which consists of a technological platform for cities and logistics companies to achieve city-wide coordination of logistics resources, maximise operational efficiency and minimise carbon emissions, pollutions, congestion and noise.

Urban Radar sees city logistics as an increasingly complex challenge that has a huge environmental impact on cities. Logistic operations are responsible for 20% of the traffic and 25-30% of urban emissions. At the same time many delivery vehicles are half empty and go on trips that could have been avoided id they had been pooled together. All of this also leads to more congestion and greater demand for parking. The rise of e-commerce and just-in-time logistics are only further exacerbating the problem.

The solution developed by Urban Radar addresses these problems by applying an AI-driven resource allocation mechanism to achieve city-wide optimal provision of deliveries, pooling together logistics resources to enable horizontal collaboration and establish a virtual city logistics network for last-mile city logistics. Unlike other similar logistics routing solutions, CityForward takes a multistakeholder approach for routing and resource allocation.

By using CityForward cities can offer local businesses new distribution channels, better coordinate local logistic operators and improve their market reach, reduce the amount of half-empty vans, integrate cargo bikes into the city network and minimise unnecessary CO2 emissions with more intelligent logistics trips.