Smart City Logistics Enabled by Digital Twins and Semantic Technologies

This research explores sustainable city logistics, emphasizing the hurdles associated with scarce urban resources, including their under- and misutilization due to a lack of real-time information on the available infrastructure and intense competition between companies. To face these challenges, there is a crucial need to improve the visibility of urban resources and logistics assets, as an enabler of effective and efficient resource allocation and orchestration of resource utilization and logistics operations. The advent of Smart Cities provides innovation opportunities, leading to the concept of Smart City Logistics (SCL). SCL will offer dual benefits: firstly, it improves resource visibility by profiting from the various fundamental technologies of Smart Cities, i.e., IoT and ICT, to collect and transfer the data of the ever-changing state of resources. Second, enhanced by Digital Twins, the real-time objects' states can be synchronized and mirrored, which will support the decision-making in SCL to guide the allocation of urban resources to provide energy-efficient, cost-effective logistics services dynamically and responsively. This research primarily focuses on SCL's conceptualization and modelling, while discussing potential future advancements.