Reimagining Urban Logistics: Satellites, Microhubs, Multimodel Synergies, and More?

Urban freight transport is undergoing a paradigm shift driven by the need for sustainability, efficiency, and adaptability in increasingly complex city environments. This seminar focuses builds on research work seeking to propose a distributed logistics framework that integrates urban satellites, microhubs, and a diverse set of transport modes (e.g., cargo bikes, drones, inland waterways). The approach leverages mathematical modeling, simulation, and optimization techniques to analyze multimodal synergies and their impact on last-mile delivery performance. Emphasis is placed on the operational coordination of decentralized logistics nodes, the design of resilient urban freight networks, and the evaluation of trade-offs between cost, service level, and environmental impact. The presentation also discusses implementation challenges for smart city logistics planning.

Professor Jairo R. Montoya-Torres holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering from École des Mines de Saint-Étienne and Jean Monnet University, France, and a postdoctoral accreditation for research supervision (“Habilitation Diploma”) from the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) of Lyon and Claude Bernard University, France. His research interests include logistics and supply chain management, urban and last-mile logistics, sustainability and digitalization in logistics, optimization methods, and simulation modeling and analysis. Recently, he has been interested in the integration of emerging technologies such as Generative AI in engineering education. He has published extensively in international journals and conferences and actively collaborates on projects related to resilient and sustainable supply chains using quantitative methods. He is also involved in academic leadership and internationalization initiatives, fostering partnerships across Europe, Latin America, and North America.