The ALICE Urban Freight Community is a member-driven ALICE Community focused on digitalisation and data exchange for urban logistics. It brings together experts, practitioners and policymakers to improve interoperability, strengthen data governance, and enable more efficient, sustainable and resilient cities.
In today’s rapidly evolving urban environments, the digitalisation of freight and mobility is essential for creating efficient, sustainable, and resilient cities. Digitalisation refers to collecting, processing and integrating data in digital form – from multiple sources, either historical or real-time – to enable efficient monitoring and support decision-making.
Digitalisation operates bidirectionally:
However, the effectiveness of such digital ecosystems depends on clear guarantees regarding data governance. A central challenge concerns data sovereignty and security. Because operational data may be sensitive for reasons of safety, competitiveness, or regulatory exposure, stakeholders require assurances about how data is protected, who can access it, and for what purposes it will be used. Establishing these governance conditions is therefore a prerequisite for meaningful data sharing.
Today, numerous digital tools, platforms, and initiatives already exist. However, they remain largely siloed. Innovative solutions collect valuable data, yet integrating multiple sources into a coherent system remains complex. Many tools are use-specific, non-standardized, and therefore difficult to replicate across cities. Even when implemented, local authorities often lack the internal technical capacity to maintain or fully exploit them. Initiatives such as traffic management systems or emerging data spaces (e.g., the European Mobility Data Space initiated by the European Commission) demonstrate progress, but interoperability between these systems remains limited. The central challenge is therefore not the absence of solutions, but the lack of standardization and seamless, on-demand integration across them.
Freight transport has historically been overlooked in city centers and treated separately from passenger mobility. Although this is gradually changing through the development of Sustainable Urban Logistics Plans (SULPs) and their integration into Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs), fragmentation persists. Improving visibility and understanding of urban freight flows and operations is a necessary first step. Digitalization and data sharing is a cornerstone of this process. It’s about integrating passenger and freight, but it’s also about ensuring a seamless journey between city centre and broader logistics, with merchandises that often cross borders on their way to the very final customer.
Digitalization and data exchange is a very transversal topic, and the purpose of this community is to assess and facilitate its application/adoption for urban logistics, in close collaboration with experts, practitioners and policymakers – in the frame of EU-funded projects DELPHI, DISCO and NEXTLOGIC. It is focused on Data Spaces as an enabler of several innovations such as Artificial Intelligence and Digital Twins, while keeping these applications outside the primary scope of the community.
The Community will create a baseline on the state of interoperability today, as experienced by ALICE members and partners, to define clear foundations on the way forward. A collection of concrete use cases and good practices will complete this work, which will be formalized through a white paper.
The current state seems clear, efforts are being made to move towards more interoperability, but silos and both technical and organizational barriers remain. With this Community, starting with the elaboration of a white paper, this ALICE community aims at gathering the voices of our members, and come together around a shared analysis, to move forward in a joint and aligned manner.
ALICE launches the Digital Urban Freight (DUF) Survey to gather practitioners’ perspectives on interoperability, governance, policy and operational gaps in current mobility and logistics data initiatives. The results will serve as a baseline for a forthcoming white paper and help shape the new DUF Community, aimed at advancing the operational digitalisation of urban freight. We invite stakeholders across the logistics ecosystem to contribute and help define priorities for more connected, efficient and data-driven urban freight systems.
Digital Urban Freight Survey: Contribute here !
marion.cottet@etp-alice.eu, ALICE Deputy Programme Manager
liz.cristaldo@etp-alice.eu, ALICE Junior Project Manager
All ALICE Urban Freight Community past events, news and documents