Can you deliver?
More than half of the world’s population live in urban areas. In Europe, the proportion is over eighty per cent. Supplying all these people with the stuff they need is a huge undertaking. In the Paris region alone, some 4.3 million deliveries are made every week. It’s everything from fish fingers to face packs, from pharmaceuticals to photocopiers, from books to boots to beef to bags to batting bats. We could go on.
In the 2022 Toyota Logistic Design Competition we’re asking you to get your head around the enormous issues involved in urban micrologistics. And suggesting ways of dealing with the rising problems. As well as improving expediency. The stumbling blocks we’re up against when it comes to urban logistics are many and variegated. For one thing, cities are getting more and more congested, so cars are increasingly banned in city centres. This move is also a way of combatting pollution.
Shorter supply chains, greater precision, more flexibility.
We’d like to hot up the flow of goods in urban environments. Iron out the wrinkles. For businesses and private individuals alike. What we certainly don’t want is more congestion and a deteriorating environment. We want smooth, fast and flexible management of an ever-increasing sea of goods. How do we get goods into the city? How do we get them to delivery points that will shorten supply chains. Managing tomorrow’s staggering number of deliveries calls for more flexible systems. More collaboration. Micromobility integrated with micrologistics is one way of looking at it.
Can you deliver this?
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Micrologistics is advanced and complicated stuff, like systems within systems. Getting vehicles, packages and people to dance, in a manner of speaking. We want you to root out slipups in managing the flow of goods into and around the city and this will require some advanced choreography. So, for this year’s design competition, micrologistics, we decided to team up with Toyota Motor Europe for an integrated approach. What we want from you are ideas that make urban logistics systems work every time, all the time.
Examine the different facets of this multi-dimensional problem, and pinpoint the specific area that you want to tackle. We want you to examine the issues holistically, and then resolve them specifically. We expect to see a multitude of solutions, all aiming to weed out what’s faulty, and replacing it with something that improves certain aspects of the urban logistics system. Or replaces the system with something superior.
A challenge within a challenge.
With the world and people’s needs undergoing accelerated change, traditional design submissions are simply not going to be enough. Below are the judging criteria on which your work will be assessed.
- Toyota heritage and brand.
- Aesthetics.
- Sensitivity to the environment, the community and the local economy.
- Safety and user-friendliness.
- Innovation and usefulness.
- Realistic to implement.
Information about Toyota, philosophy, heritage and brand is available on the About Toyota webpage.
