How to anticipate the level of activity of a sustainable collaborative network: The case of urban freight delivery through logistics platforms

In this paper, we elaborate a methodology to study a particular case of collaborative network: city logistics. We identify that many solutions for urban logistics are, most of time, badly evaluated. Indeed, the theory often predicts a positive effect but the reality is most of time counterbalanced. We tried to fill this gap by making use of innovative methods. To do so, we mobilize several domains of knowledge: operational research, game theory and transportation studies on real cases. We suggest a solution to anticipate the level of activity of an Urban Consolidation Center and determine the condition under which it generates benefit for a carrier using or not, the collaborative network. We present the result obtained by application of our method on the real case of the city of Saint-Etienne.