A lot of attention has been paid in the last years to urban freight transport (UFT) activities generated by specific market segments such as food, retail, or home deliveries, while relatively little attention has been paid to the transport of goods to and from construction sites in urban areas. Although transport of construction materials represents up to 30% of freight movements in cities and even more in terms of pollutant emissions. Using data collected over eight months in four construction sites, this paper provides a better understanding of the urban freight transport activity related to construction and presents the potential benefits of the implementation of construction consolidation centres (CCCs). A CCC is an innovative approach, which aims at increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of logistics processes by reducing the number of deliveries. Consequently, the use of a CCC in urban areas can reduce congestion and pollutant emissions due to construction freight movements. This paper presents results of CCC usage simulations for the four construction sites mentioned above. The results suggest that the distribution of goods to and from construction sites is peculiar as compared to other, better-known, urban supply chains and reinforce the call to researchers and decision makers from both private and public sides to devote more attention to this market segment.

This paper describes how a Geographical Information System (GIS) applied to urban logistics can be used for modelling complex urban freight situations, such as those related to the ‘last mile deliveries’. It also highlights the fact that combining a GIS with tangible technologies enables creating a collaborative tool that can be used by a wide range of logistics stakeholders, even the non-specialists. It is explained how this collaborative GIS has been subject to experimenting in workshops related to urban logistics in European cities (London, Brussels and Luxembourg). The specific case study of Luxembourg is detailed. Finally, the paper stresses the key benefits of such a collaborative GIS, namely to foster discussions around specific topics and to make collective decisions.

Efficient logistics in urban areas is crucial for construction companies since building materials account for 30–40% of all construction costs and the space on site is highly constrained. To face these challenges, actions coming from both public and private decision-makers to find more sustainable solutions related to the distribution of building materials in urban areas become urgent. Although barely used in such contexts, can decision support systems be of support, and for who and for which purpose? This paper proposes a set of decision support systems addressing public and private decision-makers to improve the construction logistics and supply chain with evidence-based decision-making mechanisms. Those systems are, in particular, a public participatory geographical information system for determining the impact of policy measures, a consolidation center locator, a consolidation center planner, and an innovation measures selector. The paper explains how these decision support systems are settled and experimented from the analysis of pilot sites in European cities and in collaboration with the companies. Our diverse experiments demonstrate that data-driven decision-making is worth it to trigger thought on improvement measures for construction freight transport in urban area. We conclude that additional attention should be devoted to this specific sector.

This paper presents our PABRE method for facilitating requirements elicitation on the basis of requirement patterns with the goal of saving time and reducing errors during this activity. The process presented applies for elicitation in off-the-shelf selection projects driven by call for tenders processes and uses a requirement patterns catalogue. The process selects patterns from the catalogue that apply to the particular selection project, and convert them into the real requirements that finally configure the project requirements book. We show some benefits of the pattern approach for requirements engineers and IT consultants, as well as for customers. Finally we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the proposal and identify some future work.

Software requirement patterns have been proposed as an artifact for fostering requirements reuse. When we define these patterns for the functional part of a software system, we realize that most of patterns are specific of a software domain. This paper presents and analyzes a catalogue of functional software requirement patterns for the domain of content management, and gives an overview of how this catalogue has been constructed from the systematic analysis of 6 existing software specification documents with the support of expert assessment.