Correos, Zaragoza and An Post debated about how to improve life in cities through optimisation of logistics and collaboration, in a session moderated by Zabala Innovation

The Global Mobility Call, a congress organised by IFEMAMadrid and Smobhub, held its second day yesterday, 15 June, with different sessions on how to accelerate the transformation towards sustainable mobility at a global level. SENATOR project was presented as an innovation project that will contribute to the goal of sustainable logistics and climate-neutral cities.

The words of the Spanish Minister for Transport, Mobility and the Urban Agenda, Raquel Sánchez, at the opening ceremony, clearly reflected the objective of the forum: “The Global Mobility Call is set to become the first reference point for the mobility of the future at a time when it is essential to share ideas and experiences in pursuit of sustainable mobility that allows us to face the colossal challenge of climate change and which requires the efforts of all.”

The round table where the SENATOR project was presented was composed by the project coordinator Ángela Nuñez (Correos), Breogan Sánchez (Fundación Zaragoza Ciudad del Conocimiento) and Aoife O’Connor (An Post), moderated by Susana Garayoa (Zabala Innovation).

What will the SENATOR cities of the future look like?

On the same morning, different delivery companies knock on our door to make deliveries. As Ángela Núñez, coordinator of the project from Correos, explains: “At SENATOR we think this is not sustainable, neither economically, socially nor for our planet.”

SENATOR aims to help overcome this by creating a control tower that will provide complete, real-time information on a city’s logistics to visualise, quantify and improve the network as a whole. This data will allow better informed decisions to be made through KPIs, as well as a proposal for network optimisation that goes beyond each operator, and that is committed to optimisation on a larger city scale, avoiding the overlapping of transport networks, and the externalities that this produces.

The round table discussed how cities can respond to the challenge of efficient and clean mobility and logistics, and how SENATOR contributes to the EU Mission for climate-neutral and smart cities by 2030.

Breogan Sánchez (Zaragoza City of Knowledge Foundation) said that “a Smart City cannot be exclusive and we will not leave anyone behind. As much as the results of the project aim to improve the delivery experience, it will also do so in terms of accessibility, reducing the gender and age gap as much as possible”.

Aoife O’Connor (An Post), highlighted the importance of cross-sector collaboration between delivery companies operating in the city and administrations. The optimisation proposed by SENATOR takes a holistic consideration of the city’s mobility, taking into account not only the entire logistics network but also traffic and infrastructure information.

“In a SENATOR-city, vehicles are fuller, with more optimised routes, a secure logistics network through the use of blockchain, and where mobility has the minimum impact, not only reducing kilometric routes, but making them more sustainable, with walking and electric vehicle routes whenever possible,” said Núñez.