Investigating Cologistics Hubs: Business Models, Added Values, Flows, Perceptions and Scalability

Abstract: Multi-service transport hubs provide a potential opportunity to achieve sustainability and emission goals and have been in contemporary research and policy discussions, however, mostly in the passenger transport sector. In Urban logistics, the delivery vehicles leaving a warehouse or a consolidation centre entering the city to deliver goods are usually filled to a certain capacity during their onward journey and when the goods are delivered, they return mostly empty during their return journey. In Urban waste management, the waste collection vehicles leaving from a waste collection centre into the city are almost empty during the onward journey and are filled to a certain capacity during their return journey, which is the opposite. To address this underutilized capacity issue, in 2017, in the city of Stockholm, a new type of Urban logistics hub was created through the Älskade Stad initiative which combined the urban logistics flows with the urban waste management flows reducing the number of vehicles required and reducing the empty space in the vehicles during both the onward and return journeys. This type of hub consolidates deliveries acting as an urban consolidation centre and also consolidates wastes, acting as a waste management centre. Due to the central nature of the hub, it can also include other services. The study coins a new term called ‘Cologistics Hub’ for this type of hub and investigates the scenarios in which Cologistics hubs are required and then builds the business models suitable for these scenarios and for maximum scalability. It identifies different types of stakeholders that can be part of the Cologistics hub ecosystem. Along with this, the study analyses different types of flows involved in a Cologistics hub, maps the business ecosystem, and identifies added values for all types of identified stakeholders in the ecosystem. In addition to this, this study analyses the perception of Cologistics hubs among the identified stakeholders and compares how the stakeholders perceive their current business-as-usual solution for urban logistics and waste management versus the Cologistics hub solution. In the end, the study provides a step-by-step strategy to follow using different conceptual frameworks used in this research for implementing a scalable Cologistics hub solution.