Construction Logistics in a City Development Setting

With the current urbanization trend, there is an increased need for city development, i.e. to build apartment buildings, hospitals, schools and infrastructure in cities and urban areas to meet the rising demands. At the same time, land is increasingly seen as a finite resource. This has led to the regeneration of decommissioned industrial-use land for development purposes. This means that multiple individual construction projects are being built in the same or nearby areas during the same time-period. However, the end products of construction projects are produced at their place of consumption, which means that large quantities of materials and resources need to be delivered to, and removed from, each construction site. This leads to new transport flows being created in connection to city development. These transport flows need to be coordinated to ensure efficient construction productivity and reduce the transports’ environmental and social impact on the urban transport system. At the same time, it is important to ensure that construction sites can be managed from a logistics perspective without impairing efficiency due to the challenges of building in urban environments. One way of managing logistics to and from construction projects in city development is through so-called construction logistics setups (CLS). However, the implementation of CLS’s affect many different stakeholders and the interorganizational relationships between them. The implementation of CLS’s therefore faces three challenges; management of transport to and from construction sites , management of logistics at construction sites , and managing the interorganizational relationships amongst construction project stakeholders . The development of CLS’s is often undertaken by mimicking previous setups as there is currently no guiding procedure for developing and implementing CLS’s. To reduce the ad hoc approach to developing and implementing CLS’s, the purpose of this dissertation is to propose a framework for developing construction logistics setups. The purpose is fulfilled with the aid of the following four research questions: RQ1: Taking the perspectives of different stakeholders’, why are CLS’s implemented? RQ2: What type of CLS services are offered? RQ3: How can performance effects of CLS’s be measured? RQ4: How do CLS’s affect the identified challenges of managing the transports to and from construction sites , managing logistics at construction site s , and managing