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Urban deliveries of goods have become a rising challenge due to the increase of online shopping in addition to the traditional business‐to‐business (B2B) dynamics. To maintain a satisfactory level of service, carriers must conduct delivery operations under restrictive environments, creating undesirable externalities such as congestion and pollution. Urban micro‐consolidation centers (UMCs) are defined as on‐street or off‐street spaces where all the deliveries within a certain radius are dropped and reconsolidated to be delivered by more sustainable last‐leg modes. Their main purpose is to mitigate such negative externalities. This work formulates the last‐mile delivery problem assisted by UMCs as a mixed‐integer quadratically‐constrained program and develops a greedy heuristic solution, inspired by the decomposition algorithms for large‐scale optimization. The simulation results and a case study in Manhattan, New York show how the heuristic provides reasonable results with respect to the exact solution while also shedding light on how its solution can be utilized for freight‐efficient urban design and policy planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an approach to model various civil infrastructure systems by explicitly identifying there interconnections or interdependencies. The civil infrastructure systems include, transportation, energy, telecommunications, and water. Taking the example of the lower Manhattan region of New York City, the authors presents the implementation of the model. It is stated that the anticipated results of the research will improve society's ability to withstand the impact of and respond to events that can disrupt the provision of services that are required for the health, safety, and economic well-being of the citizenry.