European research project, SUCCESS, which is coordinated by the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), will be launching one of its four pilot construction sites in Luxembourg-Neudorf; it was decided at the kick-off meetings held in Luxembourg yesterday and today, that it would serve as one of the several sites, with the goal of uniting institutions and businesses around the shared challenge of reducing the transport of building materials and its impact on cities.
Backed by a €3.24M budget, SUCCESS is one of the flagship projects of the “Smart, Green and Integrated Transport” challenge within European funding programme Horizon 2020. Its aim is essentially to improve the logistics management of urban construction sites through innovative solutions.
Project Background
City populations are constantly increasing. By 2050, 82% of the European population will be living in urban areas. This gives rise to significant needs, not only in terms of infrastructure, but also in terms of new construction work and the renovation of existing buildings, which, in turn, entails an increase in the influx of building materials to these cities.
In addition, the construction industry also generates a significant amount of waste, which needs to be removed from the cities ("reverse logistics"). For city-dwellers, all these activities go hand in hand with pollution, traffic congestion, noise, damaged infrastructure and, ultimately, a compromised quality of life. Today, the construction industry already represents 50% of overall freight transport within cities, according to the National Union of Aggregate Producers.
The SUCCESS project then, as stated before, aims to reduce the harmful effects of urban freight distribution, as well as its cost, by proposing innovative solutions applicable throughout Europe. To this end, the project team will examine the extent to which the concepts of "Supply Chain Management" and in particular a "Construction Consolidation Centre" - CCC) can contribute towards reducing the harmful effect of the influx of building materials to cities.
Four construction sites located in Paris, Valencia, Verona and Luxembourg will provide case studies. Located in high-density urban areas with significant traffic congestion issues and certain environmental constraints, these pilot sites will allow for collection of the data required to devise suitable solutions, and put forward concrete demonstrators.
Finally, gains in terms of the number of trips, vehicles travelling at full-load capacity, kilometres travelled, CO2 emissions in the cities, as well as delivery turnaround times and productivity at the construction site will be analysed amongst other factors, to allow for a viable business model for a consolidation centre to be put forward to each construction-site stakeholder.
A strong partnership
LIST will coordinate the project, which will have the expertise it has acquired over the past few years through numerous projects led in this field recognised at European level.
The SUCCESS project has many other partners in the other three countries – where pilot sites will be situated. In fact, each country will be represented in the project by an institutional partner and a leading company in both the country concerned, and in Europe. This is undoubtedly one of the arguments brought to light in the selection of the SUCCESS project from amongst 767 project proposals submitted in response to the call for proposals, a highly competitive tender process in which only 8% of the proposals were shortlisted.
This strong partnership forecasts positive results with a long-term impact, and which will be ready to be used across all European countries.
