Freight transport system for urban shipment and delivery

Many problems with present conventional delivery scenarios in urban areas are caused by use of conventional vehicles. These problems are amongst others limited efficiency, ecological damages, disturbance of moving traffic and pedestrians and difficulties to comply with environmental and traffic regulations, affecting local communities, business people and their customers as well as the logistic companies. Courier, Express & Parcel (CEP) providers are obliged to use conventional cars and vans due to the lack of specialized solutions. Therefore our approach is improvement of urban shipment and delivery based on existing infrastructure by means of an innovative vehicle concept. Core of the developed transport system is a uniaxial transport unit, designed for application both as part of a multiple trailer vehicle and for use as separate hand-guided transportation unit. The concept was developed based on a catalog of requirements for a vehicle for urban shipment and delivery, a result from the EU research project FIDEUS. The developed concept satisfies all formulated demands. A test vehicle of the transport system was built. Current research focuses on controller synthesis and implementation. The next step intended is execution of field tests involving logistic companies to prove the vehicle system's suitability for daily use and to discover potential for improvement.