In this paper, a review of the recent scientific literature contributions on innovative strategies for last mile logistics, focusing on externalities cost reduction, is presented. Transport is causing problems in urban areas, in particular in freight transport: modern cities need solutions to reduce externalities costs such as congestion, pollution and others, which have increased in the last few years, especially due to the growth of goods delivery. Online sales and globalization lead to new trends in freight transport, and moreover, a larger quantity of goods is expected to be delivered in the next future. In this context, most of the delivered goods end up in the city centers. Last mile logistics is the least efficient stage of the supply chain and comprises up to 28% of the total delivery cost. Therefore, the improvement of last mile logistics and a significant externalities reduction are very important challenges for researchers. New technologies and transport means, innovative techniques and organizational strategies allow handling in a more effective way the last mile delivery in urban areas. Based on the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method, recent papers that significantly contributed, with original proposals, to the reduction of externalities in urban logistics are identified and analyzed in this work. Furthermore, a classification of the papers dealing with the externality reduction problem is presented. It is consistent with a general formulation proposed to evaluate external costs in urban area. The innovative contributions are classified into five main categories: innovative vehicles, proximity stations or points, collaborative and cooperative urban logistics, optimization of transport management and routing, innovations in public policies and infrastructures. The new paradigm of smart logistics is based on the combination of these concepts and on the proposed innovations.

Nowadays, the combustion of fossil fuels for transportation has a major negative impact on the environment. All nations are concerned with environmental safety and the regulation of pollution, motivating researchers across the world to find an alternate transportation fuel. The transition of the transportation sector towards sustainability for environmental safety can be achieved by the manifestation and commercialization of clean hydrogen fuel. Hydrogen fuel for sustainable mobility has its own effectiveness in terms of its generation and refueling processes. As the fuel requirement of vehicles cannot be anticipated because it depends on its utilization, choosing hydrogen refueling and onboard generation can be a point of major concern. This review article describes the present status of hydrogen fuel utilization with a particular focus on the transportation industry. The advantages of onboard hydrogen generation and refueling hydrogen for internal combustion are discussed. In terms of performance, affordability, and lifetime, onboard hydrogen-generating subsystems must compete with what automobile manufacturers and consumers have seen in modern vehicles to date. In internal combustion engines, hydrogen has various benefits in terms of combustive properties, but it needs a careful engine design to avoid anomalous combustion, which is a major difficulty with hydrogen engines. Automobile makers and buyers will not invest in fuel cell technology until the technologies that make up the various components of a fuel cell automobile have advanced to acceptable levels of cost, performance, reliability, durability, and safety. Above all, a substantial advancement in the fuel cell stack is required.

Experts confirm that 85% of the world’s population is expected to live in cities by 2050. Therefore, cities should be prepared to satisfy the needs of their citizens and provide the best services. The idea of a city of the future is commonly represented by the smart city, which is a more efficient system that optimizes its resources and services, through the use of monitoring and communication technology. Thus, one of the steps towards sustainability for cities around the world is to make a transition into smart cities. Here, sensors play an important role in the system, as they gather relevant information from the city, citizens, and the corresponding communication networks that transfer the information in real-time. Although the use of these sensors is diverse, their application can be categorized in six different groups: energy, health, mobility, security, water, and waste management. Based on these groups, this review presents an analysis of different sensors that are typically used in efforts toward creating smart cities. Insights about different applications and communication systems are provided, as well as the main opportunities and challenges faced when making a transition to a smart city. Ultimately, this process is not only about smart urban infrastructure, but more importantly about how these new sensing capabilities and digitization developments improve quality of life. Smarter communities are those that socialize, adapt, and invest through transparent and inclusive community engagement in these technologies based on local and regional societal needs and values. Cyber security disruptions and privacy remain chief vulnerabilities.

In the era of technological transformation, mobility and transportation systems are becoming more intelligent and greener. Thanks to powerful technologies and tools, electric and autonomous vehicles are spreading worldwide, substituting internal combustion engine vehicles and revolutionizing the way to drive. In this context, this paper is an extended version of the paper “Digital Twin in Intelligent Transportation Systems: a Review published in 2020 7th International Conference on Control, Decision and Information Technologies (CoDIT)”. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the literature from the last five years on the use of digital twin (DT) technology for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs), focusing on electric and autonomous vehicles. In particular, with respect to the previous work, the focus has been expanded to include DT integration with other cutting-edge technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and 5G for ITS. Moreover, this paper presents a broad perspective on challenges in EV applications, including tracking, monitoring, battery and charge management, connectivity, security, and privacy. In addition, this paper discusses how DT can be used to effectively address the current issues in electric vehicle services, such as tracking, monitoring, battery and charge management, connectivity, security, and privacy.

The long-term electricity demand forecast of the consumer utilization is essential for the energy provider to analyze the future demand and for the accurate management of demand response. Forecasting the consumer electricity demand with efficient and accurate strategies will help the energy provider to optimally plan generation points, such as solar and wind, and produce energy accordingly to reduce the rate of depletion. Various demand forecasting models have been developed and implemented in the literature. However, an efficient and accurate forecasting model is required to study the daily consumption of the consumers from their historical data and forecast the necessary energy demand from the consumer’s side. The proposed recurrent neural network gradient boosting regression tree (RNN-GBRT) forecasting technique allows one to reduce the demand for electricity by studying the daily usage pattern of consumers, which would significantly help to cope with the accurate evaluation. The efficiency of the proposed forecasting model is compared with various conventional models. In addition, by the utilization of power consumption data, power theft detection in the distribution line is monitored to avoid financial losses by the utility provider. This paper also deals with the consumer’s energy analysis, useful in tracking the data consistency to detect any kind of abnormal and sudden change in the meter reading, thereby distinguishing the tampering of meters and power theft. Indeed, power theft is an important issue to be addressed particularly in developing and economically lagging countries, such as India. The results obtained by the proposed methodology have been analyzed and discussed to validate their efficacy.

This paper faces the energy management problem of cooperative microgrids in a smart energy district. In particular, the aim of the research work is to propose an innovative optimization model to solve the problem of energy management in a district composed of several microgrids, taking into account uncertainties of key parameters. In this context, the objective of the paper is threefold: i) maximize the use of energy purchased at the day-ahead market; ii) minimize the need of additional and expensive energy in real-time iii) optimize the integration of renewable energy sources (RES), energy storage systems (ESS) and electric vehicle (EV) batteries in the microgrid. To these goals, the District Energy Management System (DEMS), i.e. the central controller of the district, must balance the microgrids energy demand with the optimal integration of RES, ESS and the batteries of EVs that are seen as movable storage devices shared among buildings. Moreover, the energy surplus can be sold back to the main power grid. The DEMS problem is solved by two approaches. In the first approach, the energy demand, the RES production and the costs are known and a linear programming problem is formalized and solved by the DEMS. In addition, a second approach is proposed in order to address the parameters uncertainty and is formalized as a stochastic linear programming problem. The optimization problems solutions provide the optimal strategy to schedule the charging and discharging operations of the storage systems and the electric vehicle batteries. A simulation case study demonstrates the benefits of the proposed approaches for the smart district.