In May 2026 DASYA lab welcomed Mina Akbarpour to work on the project CARGOBIKE-SCALE in collaboration with Kale AI (lead partner) (UK), Cargonautes (FR), BIKELOGIC (ES), urbike (BE), University of Westminster (UK). The project is funded by EIT Urban Mobility.
The CARGOBIKE-SCALE project addresses the rapid growth of urban freight and its impacts on climate and liveability. Motorised freight generates a large share of urban emissions and contributes to traffic congestion. Concurrently, parcel volumes are accelerating. This makes traditional van-based logistics fundamentally unsustainable, especially as cities expand zero-emission zones and tighten freight regulations.
Light electric vehicles (LEVs), such as cargo bikes, have on average around 95% lower CO2 emissions compared with vans and outperform motorised vehicles in dense urban areas. Additionally, the ability of cargo bikes to park closer to final delivery points and travel faster in congested conditions can reduce delivery time by 60%. However, most logistics operators, particularly SMEs, struggle to scale beyond pilots due to operational complexity. Successful deployments depend on sophisticated coordination, planning, and data-driven decision-making that is currently accessible only to larger organisations.
In order to fully exploit the advantages of including cargo-bikes in mixed fleets in European operational contexts and to narrow the gap between research-backed potential and market-ready solutions there is a need for: reliable benchmarks to compare mixed fleet performance against current truck and van based operations; automation tools (for task grouping and routing) fitted for the complexities of mixed fleets deployment. The goal of this research project is to give the academic community access to anonymised real-world operational data and kick-start developing more practical optimisation models that will feed into automation tools.
