From the 12th to the 14th of june 2019 the Chair will present two of its works in the 11th International Conference  on City Logistics.

The presented works are:

• « Unsupervised Machine Learning for better understanding the mainstream view of City Logistics » (Simon TAMAYO, François COMBES, Arthur GAUDRON).  Download presentation,   Go to publication.

• « Interactive Simulation For Co-Constructing A City Logistics Solution » (Arthur GAUDRON, Arnaud de LA FORTELLE, Simon TAMAYO).

In this link you can download the program of the conference.

In May 2019 the Chair will present two of its works in the world transport conference organized by Elsevier.

The presented works are:

• “Classifying logistic vehicles in cities using Deep Learning” (S. Benslimane *, S. Tamayo, A. De La Fortelle)
• “Food open-air markets in Paris: transportation environmental issues” (R. Benoit, C. Gunot, S. Tamayo *, A. Gaudron, F. Fontane)

In this link you can download the program of the conference.

Hereafter you will find the abstracts of the presented works:

« Food open-air markets in Paris: transportation environmental issues »

Abstract— Food consumption habits have changed significantly in recent years due to the emergence of new distribution methods; such as shorter food supply chains. Today, consumers have access to a wide range of ways to do their groceries: online, through farm cooperatives and specialized stores. Historical vectors of food supply and representing a French-style “Art de Vivre”, local markets seem unshakeable and continue to play an important role in the lives of French citizens who seek to shop local. Faced with new consumer demands, local markets are looking to adapt to the changing habits of their customers, particularly in terms of environmental impacts. More specifically, Parisian markets are affected by the increasingly restrictive transportation environmental standards enforced by the city. Despite this, very few studies have been conducted on the real impact of the transport of food markets, which supply Parisians on a daily basis. They stand out from their regional counterparts, as the Ile-de- France region is not self-sufficient to feed all of its inhabitants, which results in only a small share of merchandise being sourced from local producers. Largely dependent on national agriculture and imports, the presence of the world’s largest fresh products market (Rungis International Market) reflects a steadily increasing need for one of the world’s most populous agglomerations. By means of a quantitative study, this article provides an initial assessment of the environmental impact of the regular maintenance of food markets and suggests potential development possibilities to maintain their activities while reducing their carbon footprint.

« Classifying logistic vehicles in cities using Deep learning »

Abstract— Rapid growth in delivery and freight transportation is increasing in urban areas; as a result the use of delivery trucks and light commercial vehicles is evolving. Major cities can use traffic counting as a tool to monitor the presence of delivery vehicles in order to implement intelligent city planning measures. Classical methods for counting vehicles use mechanical, electromagnetic or pneumatic sensors, but these devices are costly, difficult to implement and only detect the presence of vehicles without giving information about their category, model or trajectory. This paper proposes a Deep Learning tool for classifying vehicles in a given image while considering different categories of logistic vehicles, namely: light-duty, medium-duty and heavy-duty vehicles. The proposed approach yields two main contributions: first we developed an architecture to create an annotated and balanced database of logistic vehicles, reducing manual annotation efforts. Second, we built a classifier that accurately classifies the logistic vehicles passing through a given road. The results of this work are: first, a database of 72 000 images for 4 vehicles classes; and second two retrained convolutional neural networks (InceptionV3 and MobileNetV2) capable of classifying vehicles with accuracies over 90%.

We are happy to introduce a new publication done in collaboration with the Masters degree in Industrial Management and Logistics Systems at MINES ParisTech PSL (MS MISL).

Authors: Raphael Benoit, Corine Gunot, Simon Tamayo , Arthur Gaudron & Frederic Fontane.

Abstract

Food consumption habits have changed significantly in recent years due to the emergence of new distribution methods; such as shorter food supply chains. Today, consumers have access to a wide range of ways to do their groceries: online, through farm cooperatives and specialized stores.

Historical vectors of food supply and representing a French-style “Art de Vivre”, local markets seem unshakeable and continue to play an important role in the lives of French citizens who seek to shop local. Faced with new consumer demands, local markets are looking to adapt to the changing habits of their customers, particularly in terms of environmental impacts. More specifically, Parisian markets are affected by the increasingly restrictive transportation environmental standards enforced by the city.

Despite this, very few studies have been conducted on the real impact of the transport of food markets, which supply Parisians on a daily basis. They stand out from their regional counterparts, as the Ile-de-France region is not self-sufficient to feed all of its inhabitants, which results in only a small share of merchandise being sourced from local producers. Largely dependent on national agriculture and imports, the presence of the world’s largest fresh products market (Rungis International Market) reflects a steadily increasing need for one of the world’s most populous agglomerations.

By means of a quantitative study, this article provides an initial assessment of the environmental impact of the regular maintenance of food markets and suggests potential development possibilities to maintain their activities while reducing their carbon footprint.

Publication

This publication will be presented at the “World Conference on Transport Research – WCTR 2019” that will be held in Mumbai during May 2019.

In our Machine Learning research projects, we are interested in using the tools of Natural Language Processing (NLP). In the example shown here, we analyze the content of twitter related to City Logistics in order to create a map of concepts.

The use of unsupervised learning algorithms such as dimensional reduction (Truncated singular value decomposition), clustering (k-means) and manifold learning (t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding) allowed us to autmatically analyze more than 110000 tweets and therefore generate the following “map of concepts“:

Click here for a full screen visualisation.

This work was submitted to the 11th  International Conference on City Logistics.  Downlaod presentation,   Go to publication.

For more information, you can contact  Simon Tamayo.

Abstract

City Logistics is characterized by multiple stakeholders that often have different objectives and constraints and therefore, different views of this complex system. Nowadays social media is one of the biggest channels of public expression and it is often used to communicate opinions and content related to City Logistics. The main idea of this research is that analyzing content from mainstream social media, such as Twitter, could help in the understanding of how people see urban logistics. This paper proposes a methodology for collecting content related to City Logistics from Twitter and implementing Machine Learning techniques, and more specifically unsupervised learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP), to perform content and sentiment analysis. The proposed methodology is applied to a set of 110 000 tweets containing City Logistics key-terms, that were posted from 2007 to 2018. Results allowed building an interest map of concepts related to City Logistics and a sentiment assessment to determine if City Logistics posts are positive, negative orneutral.

Acknowledgment

This research is inspired by the works of Olson et Al. [1] and Kruchten [2] who proposed an analysis of the preferences of the users posting in the web site reddit.

[1]  R. S. Olson and Z. P. Neal, “Navigating the massive world of reddit: using backbone networks to map user interests in social media,” PeerJ Comput. Sci., vol. 1, p. e4, May 2015.

[2]  N. Kruchten, “Data Science and (Unsupervised) Machine Learning with scikit-learn,” in Montreal Python, 2014.

On May 14th and 15th, the Urban Logistics Chair will participate in the international conference ICUTCL 2018 “20th International Conference on Urban Transportation and City Logistics” in London.

The Chair will present the research work titled “Statistic Regression and Open Data Approach for Identifying Economic Indicators That Influence e-Commerce“.

In addition, Simon Tamayo was appointed Chairman for Session IX of the conference.

Summary of the presented work

This paper presents a statistical approach to identify explanatory variables linearly related to e-commerce sales. The proposed methodology allows specifying a regression model in order to quantify the relevance between openly available data (economic and demographic) and national e-commerce sales. The proposed methodology consists in collecting data, preselecting input variables, performing regressions for choosing variables and models, testing and validating. The usefulness of the proposed approach is twofold: on the one hand, it allows identifying the variables that influence e- commerce sales with an accessible approach. And on the other hand, it can be used to model future sales from the input variables. Results show that e-commerce is linearly dependent on 11 economic and demographic indicators.

The Urban Logistics Chair at MINES ParisTech organises a symposium entitled “Future Trends and Technologies for Urban Mobility and City Logistics”.

This symposium will take place on May 17th from 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm in the room L109, at MINES ParisTech (60 boulevard Saint-Michel, 75006, Paris). This event is free but registration is mandatory.

To participate in this event, please register in the following form: https://goo.gl/forms/uLGnuNXbpLCVlHdW2

The symposium will be hosted by professor Jacek Zak, from the Poznan University of Technology, who will give two presentations (in English):

• The Logistics Concept of the New Silk Route (Chinese – European Cooperation)
• New Ideas and Solutions for Urban Mobility and City Logistics (incl. Autonomous Vehicles) – Design and Evaluation

A part of the works of the Urban Logistics Chaire consists in modelling urban logistics flows using information available in Open Data portals and open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

The example shown here explores automatic query tools for OpenStreetMap and interactive mapping (Folium / Leafet).

The map below proposes a heatmap of restaurants in France

Click here for a full screen view.

As part of the Athens Week, the Urban Logistics Chair organized the course MP09 “Urban Logistics: Understanding, modeling and simulating urban freight” at Mines ParisTech, from Monday 19th to Friday23rd March 2017.

35 students took part in this course, coming from the following schools:

• Germany: Technische Universität München (TU Munich)
• Belgium: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL)
• Spain: Universidad Politécnica of Madrid
• France: Arts et Métiers ParisTech
• France: ParisTech Mines
• France: Institut d’Optique ParisTech
• Italy: Politecnico di Milano (PM)
• Norway: Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet (NTNU)
• Netherlands: Delft University of Technology (TU Delft)
• Poland: Warsaw University of Technology (WUT)
• Portugal: Instituto Superior Técnico (IST)
• Czech Republic: Czech technical university in Prague (CVUT)
• Turkey: Istanbul Technical University (ITU)

The Chair participated in the 7th International Urban Freight Conference “Metrans I-NUF”, held in Long Beach (California) from October 17th to Octobre 20th, 2017.

The Chair presented the following three papers:

• “Quantifying flows of urban goods using image processing and machine learning”, Simon TAMAYO, Xavier SATTLER & Arthur GAUDRON.
• “Simulating environmental impacts of urban deliveries”, Sarra JLASSI, Simon TAMAYO, Arnaud de LA FORTELLE & Arthur GAUDRON.
• “Truck-bike multimodal distribution scheme for urban deliveries simulation for operational planning”, Arthur GAUDRON, Simon TAMAYO & Arnaud de LA FORTELLE.