Down Town Purchase Porterage Services[Le portage d'achat en Centre-ville, vers la mise en place d'un service de proximité de centre-ville, Rapport scientifique]

The subject of this project is purchase porterage services. Four objectives are pursued: identify these services from a theoretical perspective and clarify their relationship with proximity concepts, survey practical experiments, analyze physical and information flows induced by these systems, provide a synthesis of all these elements with the support of numerical simulation applied to the cities of Aix-en-Provence and Marseilles. At first, we investigated the expectations and possible forms of purchase porterage services. This first stage allowed a better understanding of the stakes of these systems in terms of proximity and services, both from a theoretical and practical angle. In parallel, we addressed physical and informational flows. A generic software tool was developed to allow the simulation of purchases and purchase porterage activities. Based on these two prerequisites, an illustrative example of purchase porterage service was defined for the city of Aix-en-Provence. Numerical experiments are scheduled soon for this scenario. The remaining part of the project will be devoted to the definition of a second scenario, for the city of Marseilles, and to the thorough analysis of the proposed systems. The experiments conducted on the city of Aix-en-Provence allow us to analyze several scenarios of installing the PAC system. Two typical days were modeled and analyzed. A busy day (e.g. a sales day) and a market day (the market of Aix-en-Provence being in the very heart of the city). Several variations of these scenarios were analyzed. They focus mainly on the distribution of the demand (point-relais, parking, home), the schedule of home delivery, delivery times, the platform location, the sizing of the vehicles, etc. These experiments allow us to strengthen and validate the trends expressed during the investigations and to identify new key points. In particular, the use of the vehicles is relatively low. It is then important to mutualize the PAC with another activity in order to make the system profitable by using remaining vehicles capacities. We have also concluded that the system cannot be established unless a reliable and functional network of public transportation is available. Thus, the environmental objectives in terms of CO2 reduction of such a system will be achieved. If such a system is adopted by users, we can imagine generalizing it to online sales and then ensure the sustainability of the system. Some points have not been addressed in this study, such as the non-availability of the customer at home, or the hijack of the system for the use of relay points (baggage rooms) for storage purposes. The use of baggage rooms in the relay points seems to be the most viable solution, but the fixed costs (rent, maintenance, etc.) of such a system should be supported by government initiatives. Home delivery remains fairly viable because of the constraints fixed by such a system and competition from online sales.