ANNONA project (Decision making tool for sustainable city logistics) is an Industrial oriented research program. It aims at producing new knowledge and methods in the domain of city freight. This project is motivated by the need of decision making tools to help institutional decision makers when designing innovative logistics solutions in city centers. It addresses item ‘smart-cities’ within axis 1 of the ‘Ville et Bâtiments Durables’ call for projects. City freight is often seen as a need for necessary evil, although it has been constantly improved since a few decades. However, most approaches to implement urban logistics are based on benchmarks. This leads to systematize what has been decided for referent cities, and select on-shelves solutions. As a consequence, such empirical approaches rarely meet the needs of all the concerned stakeholders. There is a lack for methods and tools aiming at predicting the impacts of innovative freight solutions at the very early design step. To fill this gap, ANNONA will address a major lockup: evaluating ex ante the multi-criteria impacts of urban logistics strategies. It will focus on a principal question: where and how to design and implement freight facilities and logistics areas in cities, with respect to sustainable objectives. To do so, new theoretical models will be proposed to deal with complexity of urban freight. A prototype of dashboard to assess the performances of logistics scenarii will be built. This prototype will be based on Geographic Information Systems so as to be used in a very interactive and visual way by decision makers and stakeholders. It will predict the consequences of freight policies on economic, environmental and social dimensions. ANNONA project team is composed of scientists in logistics, environment sciences, economics of transports, and dynamic modeling of traffic. Multi-disciplinary has been favored so as to fully address the multiple dimensions of urban freight problematic. International partnership with South America is a contributing factor to enlarge the vision of cities beyond the borders of Europa. Last but not least, institutional partners will bring their own know how to make sure the proposed solutions are relevant in the field.

The consumption of energy is expected to increase by 2030 and 2050 (according to baseline projections incorporating current trends) due to two combined factors. On one hand, the population growth anticipated during this period will result in an increase in energy consumption and demand.. On the other hand, daily and seasonal peaks in electricity demand will intensify with the development and diversification of urban needs (especially in the transport and housing sectors). These combined effects cannot be cross analysed with the current general assessments of the environmental impacts of consumption in energy. These general assessments, which are completed every few years, are based on a calculation of the gross volume of energy produced that are not related to an anticipation of the variations in energy demand. This calls for a change in the analytical framework of urban systems in order to enable a cross analysis of urban structures on medium and long term and their impacts in peak demand. The project SUD (Dynamic Urban Systems) aims to lift these scientific and operational barriers, and will develop a highly integrated and system-dynamics modeling approach based on the various flows that affect the urban system (transportation, energy in building sector). The SUD model will enable the building of scenarios with a number of clearly defined assumptions and modeling parameters, including social and economical constraints. This will enable there to be an accurate assessment of the actual environmental impacts of technical solutions: in terms of sustainability of urban systems and their capacity to smooth peaks in demand to match supply (for example, dynamic management of energy demand with the development of smart grids, energy storage, etc.).

In a context of climate change, dwindling fossil resources and mild economic growth, urban sustainability has become a key policy issue. Given the complexity of modern urban areas, designing sustainable policies calls for more than sheer expert knowledge. This is especially true of transport or land use policies, because of the strong interplay between the land use and the transportation systems. Policies that seem perfectly sound intuitively may ultimately yield undesirable effects because of this connection, which is extremely hard to apprehend without the help of numerical simulations. Land use and transport integrated (LUTI) modeling thus offers invaluable analysis tools for planners working on transportation and urban projects. Yet, very few local authorities in charge of planning make use of these strategic models. The explanation lies first in the difficulty to calibrate these models, second in the lack of confidence in their results, which itself stems from the absence of any well-defined validation procedure. This proposal aims to foster the use of LUTI models for the design and evaluation of land use and transport policies by addressing these two impediments. This involves: (a) defining a calibration methodology and developing relevant and efficient algorithms to facilitate the parameter estimation of LUTI models; (b) defining a validation methodology, in both the historical and urban economics senses, and developing the related algorithms. In both cases, analyzing the uncertainty that may arise from either the data or the underlying equations, quantifying how these uncertainties propagate in the model, and performing sensitivity analysis to determine the relevance of the various data and model parameters are of major importance. Completing these various tasks would make LUTI models easier to implement, and greatly enhance the confidence in their results. Three LUTI models will serve as sample to test the methodologies that will be developed in the CITiES project: TRANUS, UrbanSim, and PIRANDELLO. They are quite representative of LUTI models, with two equilibrium models and one activity-based model (or transition model). TRANUS and UrbanSim are open source and also the most largely applied models worldwide, while PIRANDELLO is the only operating model developed in France. The study areas are the Grenoble region for TRANUS, the Lyon region for UrbanSim and the Paris region for PIRANDELLO, which offer different local contexts. The consortium also intends to support the dissemination of LUTI models and CITiES results through significant interactions with policy-makers and end users, in the form of workshops and information meetings. Besides the scientific difficulties raised by the development of adequate methodologies, another important issue lies in the significant amount of data that is needed to perform the historical validation steps for the case studies. Data acquisition and post treatment will therefore be a task in itself. To successfully carry out the CITiES project, the consortium can draw on two main strengths: • its unique panel of experts in urban modeling, urban planning, mathematics and computer science, which is to be the cornerstone of the development of innovative tools for the calibration and the management of uncertainties in LUTI models; • the significant experience of most partners with LUTI modeling. The partnership with the IAU îdF and the AURG will also prove extremely fruitful, considering both the data issues and the firm intent to interact with end users. If the pluridisciplinary character of the project is clearly an asset, it may also constitute a more important difficulty in terms of communication between team members; particular care will be paid in the project management to ensure smooth exchanges of information and knowledge and mutual understanding between the different scientific communities involved in the project.