The Last Mile Challenge: Innovating Urban Freight Deliveries

Senior Project and Technical Manager, in FIT Consulting since May 2023. She is involved in project management activities and proposal writing activities related to EU funded projects related to transport and mobility. She is also involved in several national projects mainly focused on urban logistics. She has past experience as consultant involved in transport planning and modeling at urban, regional and national scales but also as research assistant at Ku Leuven (Belgium) focusing on transport modeling activities.

Joris Beckers is professor Economic Geography and Urban Logistics at the Department of Transport and Regional Economics at the University of Antwerp. His current research focuses on the design of sustainable (urban) economic and transport networks in the context of the on-demand economy. His work involves the development of quantitative spatial analysis for freight and retail planning, consumer analytics and business modeling. Dr. Beckers is a Ph.D. in Applied Economics and a MSc. in Geography.

Ioanna is heading the research lab of Inlecom Innovation and has over 20 years’ experience in R&D projects. Her focus in the last ten years is the introduction of novel technologies in transport and logistics, including IoT, digital twins, AI and blockchain towards greening and optimising operations. Apart from coordinator of URBANE project, she has been the technical coordinator relevant projects that introduce innovations in logistics such as AUTOSUP and LEAD.

Master in Forestry Engineering by the Polytechnic University of Madrid and Expert in Geographical Information Systems (G.I.S.) and Remote sensing by the Complutense University of Madrid. He worked as Environmental Consultant in the biggest Law firm in Spain until 2008, when he joined EMT Madrid, public company owned by the city of Madrid, which is the biggest public mobility operator in Spain, managing different mobility services such as the urban bus (2,100 buses, 100% clean fleet), the tow trucks service, underground parking facilities (12,540 parking lots), e-bike sharing system Bicimad (7,500 e-bikes and 611 bike stations) and the cable car. He specialized himself in sustainable urban mobility with special emphasis in mobility governance, electric mobility and international projects and networks. He is currently leading the International and EU projects department of the Madrid Public Transport Company.

Raffaele is Project Manager at POLIS and coordinator of its Urban Freight Working Group. He oversees thematically related projects and activities in the urban freight cluster. POLIS portfolio includes the DISCO, GREEN-LOG, MoloHubs, MOVE21, URBANE, UNCHAIN projects. Raffaele has co-written and contributed to more than ten research studies commissioned by the European Commission and the European Parliament, and has taken part in international working groups focused on transport and tourism, such as the Alpine Convention. He holds a master's degree in Geography and Spatial Planning from the University of Bologna.