# Solutions to the Problem of Freight Transport Flows in Urban Logistics
## 1 Introduction  
As cities grow, new challenges arise for mobility. It is estimated that 10-15% of the total mileage of a city comes from freight transport. When freight flows increase in cities, many different problems arise, such as loading and delivery delays, increasing environmental pollution and noise. Other problems also arise, such as lack of heavy transport drivers, wear and tear of roads, etc. As the population grows, urban logistics has become the subject of scientific research and has gained great importance. In recent decades, more and more people live in cities. From 1950 to 2018, the proportion of the world's population in cities increased to 55 percent [1]. Rapid urbanization has also brought unprecedented challenges. The future sustainability of cities depends on the compatibility of development and the environment and the applied innovations [2]. Increasing traffic flows cause a number of problems [3; 4; 5]. Therefore, many researchers are looking for various solutions that can be applied in urban logistics. Dutch scientists estimate that the amount of greenhouse gas emissions across the country was as high as 0.9 million cubic meters [6]. As early as 2001, researchers [7] defined urban logistics as a process that allows complete optimization of logistics and transport activities of companies based on advanced information systems in urban areas, including traffic environment, traffic congestion, traffic safety, and energy saving, in the conditions of a market economy [8]. With the expansion of cities, access of commercial transport to the central part of a city is an increasing problem, which affects overall mobility in a city, especially during rush hours. The main problems for the mobility of cargo traffic flow are due to outdated infrastructure, slow implementation of information technologies to create a common informational field of urban logistics, and underutilization of car capacity in order to reduce the flow of partially loaded cars in cities. The intensity of heavy and freight transport flows in a city is uneven. The negative impact of this transport on city logistics is manifested when all traffic flows are intensive in city logistics. Freight transport negatively affects the speed of traffic flows and can be the cause of both technical accidents and traffic jams [5]. In this case, logistics companies suffer losses due to late or non-delivered cargo. The quality of service drops due to congestion. The main function of freight transport is the physical transport of goods, including the delivery of goods to receivers within the limits of a city's logistics infrastructure [8]. Optimization of the distribution of freight transport flows can be performed by modelling the consequences of emergency situations. The purpose of this study is to determine the subjective normalized weights of the main factors that have the greatest influence on a city's logistics system, using [PERSON]'s correlation coefficient method and the average rank transformation of weights (ARTIW) method [9]. At the same time, the main problems of the topic under analysis are identified, along with the dependencies of the phenomena and possible trends and insights. After systematizing the obtained results, a possible solution for the optimization of freight transport flows in a city is formulated, which would provide a real basis for the optimal distribution of freight transport flows in cities. It can be said that the study and its results are relevant for potentially interested parties, which are city municipalities, transport and logistics companies, service providers, and users located in the city boundaries. The study is universal enough and its process can be easily replicated in different cities, and the results of the existing study are applicable in different cities as well. In any case, it should be taken into account that the current study was carried out based on a city with a population of 700,000, a developed transport and logistics infrastructure and the city covers an area of 401 km\({}^{2}\).