Enabling the freight traffic controller for collaborative multi-drop urban logistics: practical and theoretical challenges

There is increasing interest in how horizontal collaboration between parcel carriers might help alleviate problems associated with last-mile logistics in congested urban centers. Through a detailed review of the literature on parcel logistics pertaining to collaboration, along with practical insights from carriers operating in the United Kingdom, this paper examines the challenges that will be faced in optimizing multicarrier, multidrop collection, and delivery schedules. A “freight traffic controller” (FTC) concept is proposed. The FTC would be a trusted third party, assigned to equitably manage the work allocation between collaborating carriers and the passage of vehicles over the last mile when joint benefits to the parties could be achieved. Creating this FTC concept required a combinatorial optimization approach for evaluation of the many combinations of hub locations, network configuration, and routing options for vehicle or walking to find the true value of each potential collaboration. At the same time, the traffic, social, and environmental impacts of these activities had to be considered. Cooperative game theory is a way to investigate the formation of collaborations (or coalitions), and the analysis used in this study identified a significant shortfall in current applications of this theory to last-mile parcel logistics. Application of theory to urban freight logistics has, thus far, failed to account for critical concerns including (a) the mismatch of vehicle parking locations relative to actual delivery addresses; (b) the combination of deliveries with collections, requests for the latter often being received in real time during the round; and (c) the variability in travel times and route options attributable to traffic and road network conditions

Fashion retailing – past, present and future

This issue of Textile Progress reviews the way that fashion retailing has developed as a result of the application of the World Wide Web and information and communications technology (ICT) by fashion-retail companies. The review therefore first considers how fashion retailing has evolved, analysing retail formats, global strategies, emerging and developing economies, and the factors that are threatening and driving growth in the fashion-retail market. The second part of the review considers the emergence of omni-channel retailing, analysing how retail has progressed and developed since the adoption of the Internet and how ICT initiatives such as mobile commerce (m-commerce), digital visualisation online, and in-store and self-service technologies have been proven to support the progression and expansion of fashion retailing. The paper concludes with recommendations on future research opportunities for gaining a better understanding of the impacts of ICT and omni-channel retailing, through which it may be possible to increase and develop knowledge and understanding of the way the sector is developing and provide fresh impetus to an already-innovative and competitive industr

Building, managing & prospering with commercial web sites

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:q96/33004 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

When virtual and material worlds collide: democratic fashion in the digital age

This paper explores the impact of the digitally-mediated communications technologies on the fashion sector. It argues that material and virtual fashion worlds are perpetually intersecting social realities that co-exist relationally, simultaneously and in mutual connection. The paper explores these shifting fashion landscapes in three particular ways in order to understand how fashion worlds are being transformed, enhanced and reproduced in space and time. Firstly, the paper argues that emergent digital technologies are remediating and refashioning existing cultural forms of signification such as fashion magazines and photography. Secondly, the article explores the potential disintermediatory effects that the internet is having on fashion markets and consumption, questioning to what extent digital technologies are enabling the devolution of fashion authority from traditional power-brokers such as magazine editors and designers towards a more diversified assemblage of participants, including fashion bloggers and consumers. Finally, the paper explores the transformative effects that digital technology is having on fashion consumption. The internet has opened up new spaces of fashion consumption that are unprecedented in their levels of ubiquity, immersion, fluidity and interactivity. Fashion spaces are increasingly portable, must follow us around, travel with us through time and space. The network effects made possible by the internet are enabling the creation of always-on, always connected consumer communities. Increasingly we are adrift without the internet, not with it. This is generating new ways of being in space where the absence of physical presence becomes second nature. Taken together, the collision between virtual and material fashion spaces requires a fundamental rethink about the role of fashion production, consumption, knowledge and the laws of markets. KEYWORDS Fashion Blogging Consumption Internet Remediation Disintermediation Burberr

Prevision des seismes par la methode VAN Mission d'analyse a Thebes (Grece). Rapport final

SIGLEAvailable at INIST (FR), Document Supply Service, under shelf-number : AR 14218 / INIST-CNRS - Institut de l'Information Scientifique et TechniqueFRFranc

Addressing the last mile problem - the transport impacts of collection/delivery points

The impacts of failed first-time home deliveries on additional carrier journeys (repeat deliveries) and customer trips (to retrieve goods from carrier depots) are of increasing concern to e-retailers and are assessed in this paper. The attended collection and delivery point (CDP) concept is one solution to first-time delivery failures, using a variety of outlets (e.g., convenience stores, petrol stations, post offices) as alternative addresses to receive deliveries. By using a database of households from across West Sussex in the United Kingdom, this paper confirms that certain benefits might accrue from using networks of Local Collect post offices, supermarkets, and railway stations as CDPs, compared with the traditional delivery method in which the carrier may make several redelivery attempts to the home with the customer making a personal trip to the carrier's depot in the event that these attempts also fail. A network of CDPs across West Sussex would function most effectively (in reducing the overall traveling costs associated with handling failed first-time deliveries) when the proportion of first-time home delivery failures is greater than 20%, the proportion of customers traveling to the depot is more than 30%, Local Collect post offices are used as CDPs, and significant numbers of people would walk to their local CDP. Customers benefit the most from CDPs, with reductions in their current traveling costs of up to 90% being modeled here. The reduction in carrier traveling costs is much less, but the processing costs associated with home delivery failures are reduced significantly by diverting the failed packages to CDPs<br/