LEAD The Hague’s workshop reflects on the challenges for creating hyperconnected cities
On March 3rd and 4th LEAD held a workshop in The Hague, one of the city partners of the project, focusing on the living lab of the hosting city. City Logistics and Physical Internet aim to improve freight transport logistics to make it more efficient, sustainable, and inclusive while also supporting economic benefits.
The title ‘Hyperconnected city’ represents The Hague’s vision of a city that manages to promote cooperation between citizens, logistics providers and multimodal transport services to improve synchronisation and efficiency of freight transport logistics. This hyperconnected city was presented by the Hague’s local partners during the workshop held on 3 March, thus proposing a new innovative way to enhance logistic systems in the freight transport sector.
However, the creation of a hyperconnected city model is not so straightforward to achieve. During the workshop, partners tried to identify the challenges that would not allow the full development of such a hyperconnected city by analysing issues that needed to be solved. Firstly, the connection between the different digital and physical segments of the freight transport logistics process is essential to guarantee the efficiency of the sector. Moreover, one of the main requirements to enable the integration of the different segments is trust among providers, which is gained through information sharing and transparency between participants.
Main conclusions of the workshop
The Logistic Service Providers (LSPs) will be able to establish a stronger bond through data pooling for a more transparent cost-benefit framework. For this reason, specific policies and governances are required to encourage data sharing. By doing so, the above-mentioned process for the creation of a hyper-connected city will have a legal basis, so that the procedure itself will be standardized for future cities aiming to follow in the same footsteps of the Hague. The LEAD project will further assist the collaboration by developing the Digital Twin of the city’s Urban Logistic System. The Hague’s Living Lab partners will continue investigating these and other challenges to achieve a truly Hyperconnected city.
