Urban freight consolidation concepts: Is There Something Missing?

Today, many cities in the world struggle with an increasing demand arising from quick population changes. Most European big cities experience congestions, pollutions, saturations, uncollected waste, public dissatisfaction, and unpleasant environment to work and live in. In order to respond properly and effectively to these phenomena, city authorities are forced to take speedy and right decisions of ensuring good living conditions for all the residents. Reorganizing, rebuilding and enlarging cities is a difficult task which in many cases is on the boundary of impossible because of historical reasons, heritage and preservation of environment. Urban Consolidation, however, might be a good solution. In this paper we introduce urban and urban freight consolidation concepts, where our aim is to identify and reveal missing knowledge to the current state of the art.