DISCO
About DISCO
Greenhouse emissions and traffic congestion are one of the most significant challenges we face today – and the way we deliver our goods and freight services and move around the city plays a massive role in this. Addressing sustainability and digital considerations in urban freight transport may help city planners to facilitate last-mile delivery and servicing in the context of urban mobility, through improved design, dynamic use of infrastructure and an appropriate mix of policy tools.
Our uniquely named project DISCO aims to support cities in undertaking the Physical Internet transformation of urban logistics and sustainable planning and to optimally and strategically manage urban and peri-urban space.

Key project facts

  • Type of action:

    HORIZON Innovation Actions

  • Consortium:

    47 partners

  • Total funding:

    €7 999 972.13

  • Starring Living Labs

  • Twinning Living Labs

  • Early Adopters

DISCO’s approach: the Meta Model Suite

DISCO stands for ‘Data-driven, Integrated, Syncromodal, Collaborative and Optimised urban freight meta-model for a new generation of urban logistics and planning with data sharing at European Living Labs’. Our aim is simple: to support the EU mission cities in achieving their climate goals by 2030, letting our living spaces breathe new life away from air pollutants.
How? We will drive EU Cities towards a Physical Internet (PI) approach that aims to overcome possible trade-offs between the accessibility of goods and services, quality of life and environmental aspects necessitating fewer kms travelled to deliver the same amount of goods.
23 data-driven innovation measures will be demonstrated across our Living Labs, pertaining to five domains in our Meta Model Suite. Find out more about each domain below!

DISCOPROXI

DISCOLLECTION

DISCOBAY

DISCOCURB

DISCOESTATE

  • DISCOPROXI

    DISCOPROXI looks at the opportunities provided by significant amounts of commercial urban space lying vacant. DISCO will use such space to establish networks of local ‘microhubs’, combined with low-emission ‘last mile’ delivery to assist the achievement of Low Emission Zones (LEZs).

  • DISCOLLECTION

    DISCOLLECTION extends horizontally across all these physical solutions, and is about developing and using advanced real time data collection methods to allow efficient, dynamic and integrated management of the various freight networks.

  • DISCOBAY

    DISCOBAY explores the potential of multimodal bays that may be underutilised particularly at certain times of the day or night, to serve as microhubs for the despatch or collection of parcel traffic.

  • DISCOCURB

    DISCOCURB looks at the problems around street-level deliveries to bars, shops, and others by feeding real time data into digital twins to facilitate dynamic space management, making the most efficient use of street capacity and minimising conflicts.

  • DISCOESTATE

    DISCOESTATE looks at the potential for multi-purposing larger buildings and infrastructure that are not in daily use, such as exhibition centres or sports stadiums, as consolidation centres for last mile delivery.

These use cases are located within the Urban Freight Data Space, which is an International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) based ecosystem that enables urban logistics and mobility actors to seamlessly share data with each other on a secure and sovereign manner.
Find out more by checking out our Living Labs.
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Synergies with other projects

Several EU-funded projects share thematic areas with DISCO. One of our main goals is to collaborate with these projects, to learn from each other and provide support to better reach our target audiences, via joint events, webinars or common sessions at relevant fairs and conferences. We aim to form long-term partnerships with our sister project UNCHAIN and other urban logistics focused projects URBANE, DECARMOBILE, GREEN-LOG, as well as the rest of the projects belonging to the CIVITAS Initiative.
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