Helsinki, Finland

Innovation focus and new services:

Autonomous Delivery Vehicles (ADVs) assisted operations.

Context and challenges:

By 2035, the City of Helsinki aims to be carbon-neutral. Low emission deliveries are key to reach this goal. However, in the inner-city area, delivery vehicles often stop inconveniently, increasing congestion, emissions and safety risks, and are too big to circulate in the city’s narrow streets. Therefore, the city wants to turn to sustainable and adequate vehicles to reduce the impacts of last mile logistics and find new solutions for data-driven planning and smart routing.

Objectives and ambitions:

  1. Reduce the number of routes by conventional urban delivery vehicles by testing and evaluating the impact of using automated delivery vehicles in the zones in and around Jätkäsaari.
  2. Deploy the new model in an extended urban area over a longer period of time.
  3. Move to long term operations integrated with daily logistic flows, measuring cost-savings, assessing the service in real life.
  4. Testing operation with a range of goods and robots deliveries in the area (with ADV fleet, teleoperation).

Innovations

  1. safety and efficiency of remote supervision and operation of ADVs
  2. complex delivery models (from fixed route of the robot to on-demand and dynamic options)
  3. ADV-based reverse logistics (e.g. parcels)
  4. micro-hubs as the storage place of the robot(s), parcels, or other sustainable modes (cargo-bikes).

Digital Twins will be adopted simulating last mile delivery value chain reorganization to measure the feasibility in challenging settings.The demonstration is expected to involve 24 vehicles in total, including a fleet of 4 ADVs.

Partners involved

  • City of Helsinki & Forum Virium Helsinki: pilot support and facilitation, engagement, reporting
  • LMAD: pilot planning and operation of autonomous platform
  • DB Schenker: parcel delivery services, testing of new scenarios and use cases​
  • SOBEN (TwinswHeel): autonomous platform provider