Viability of consolidation centre in urban freight delivery management: a case of Tier two city

Abstract

Growth in urbanization has increased immense pressure on daily needs of the people in urban area, this has led to increase focus on effective delivery and management of available resources. In most of the Indian cities, the distribution of freight is highly unorganized and unattended. It is uneconomical, as well as unecological. This subsequently decrease the efficiency of the urban freight delivery system, increasing the overall cost and also negative externalities such as noise, emission, accidents etc. Firstly, the distribution of urban freight within the urban area has to be streamlined; secondly, the freight handling at present is unorganized and need proper guideline along with infrastructure facilities and thirdly, being the important part of economy the coordination with various authorities and stakeholders needs to be tacked. The lack of profound knowledge and data on urban freight can often lead to improper decisions and actions on freight transport planning and handling, freight distribution, mode selection and environment effects. Optimization of cost is the key success of freight logistics. Urban consolidation centre (UCC) is a city logistics strategy with cross-docking facility that can possibly enhance the efficiency of urban freight distribution system by reducing all the negative externalities caused by goods transport. In this research the focus is on UCC, with a perspective about efficient distribution of goods and improve freight handling conditions. This concept has been working efficiently for many years in European cities. But its viability has not been tested for Indian city, which will be investigated in this thesis. In this research, the city of Cuttack, Odisha has been selected as the study area, which is a major commercial and business hub in the state and actually caters to the need of the whole state in terms of wholesale commodities. The city is witnessing huge flow of goods and vehicle on a daily basis that is not being managed properly, which is the subject of matter in this study. The scope of work is based on B2B freight flow i.e., from shippers/ distributors to wholesalers/ local distributors, through freight carriers or logistics service providers. Detailed literature study is done regarding freight distribution system, urban consolidation centre, vehicle routing and efficiency assessment etc. Based on the need of the research required analysis and requirement of respective data havebeen studied. Data collection techniques, respected stakeholders and requirement of survey have been outlined and survey formats have been prepared. Data have been collected from respective primary or secondary sources. Depending upon the existing distribution characteristics possible adaptation of urban consolidation centre are investigated and compared with respect to exiting situation. The adaptation is on the basis of viability assessment of the functioning of consolidation centre, based on some economic, environmental and social factors derived from literature study. This study throws light on what is the potential of the adapting the concept of consolidation centre for urban freight delivery in regards to a typical Indian tier 2 city and to check its effectiveness with compared to existing system. Recommendations for UCC have been provided such as location of UCC characteristics, functioning, operation and regulation. Also, some other spatial and operational strategies related to urban freight delivery are proposed for the efficient and effective freight delivery and handling in the city.