Glossary
Urban logistics: practical issues and perspectives

Decoupled household purchases

Decoupled household purchasing, or the decoupling of the purchase and recovery of goods by households, covers any form of practice in which the act of purchasing a good is separated in time and/or space from its physical recovery.

Today, e-commerce is the main form of purchase-recovery decoupling, but other forms also exist (e.g. delivery at the supermarket checkout).

Urban logistics box (BLU)

Lockers for depositing parcels, which are retrieved by means of a code supplied in advance; automated systems, which directly manage the communication process and the delivery of goods.

Logistics chain

All the steps required to move products from the place of production to the place of final consumption. This involves successive...