Customized policies for sustainable urban distribution

Nowadays, urban freight policies often focus on restricting of urban freight transport without taking into account transport efficiency and sustainability issues. Time window regulations, for example, are commonplace in urban environments to increase attractiveness and reduce the negative impacts of urban distribution. However, these restrictions also lead to environmental pollution, increased costs and congestion. In industry, revenue management is the practice of managing demand in a manner that increases profitability. The key idea is customizing the product offering to exploit the market's heterogeneity. In this chapter we examine demand management and identify possible contributions from revenue management to the urban freight transport setting. Moreover, we point out the implications of more customized time window policies for the different stakeholders. © 2008 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.