Hans Quak

Professorship chair

Smart cities and logistics (Breda University of Applied sciences)

Research area

It includes the provision of services contributing to efficiently managing the movements of goods in cities and providing innovative responses to customer demands. As such it combines questions on last-mile deliveries and e-commerce, deploying innovations from the automotive industry (e.g. battery electric freight vehicles) or organizing / planning more efficient and collaborative to reduce vehicle kilometers, as well as required (urban) space. This research area focusses both on smarter and more sustainable urban freight transport by bringing together innovations from different domains; i.e. technology (both vehicle technology as well as ICT developments), policy and spatial planning as well as the logistical organization (e.g. the use of shared hubs). The interest in city logistics is increasing also from a more applied research perspective, as a serious transition is required for the (near) future towards a sustainable (or zero emission) and more autonomous system. My ambition is to contribute to this transition in the development of knowledge (data, logistics concepts, bringing together different parties and disciplines) based on opportunities from innovations outside the field.

Top publications

• B Kin, M Hopman, H Quak (2021) Different Charging Strategies for Electric Vehicle Fleets in Urban Freight Transport. Sustainability 13 (23), 13080
• H Quak, R van Duin, B Hendriks (2020) Running an urban consolidation centre: Binnenstadservice 10 years back and forth. Transportation Research Procedia 46, 45-52
• H Quak, N Nesterova, R Kok, RG Thompson (2019) Public procurement as driver for more sustainable urban freight transport. Transportation Research Procedia 39, 428-439
• R Van Duin, M Slabbekoorn, L Tavasszy, H Quak (2018) Identifying dominant stakeholder perspectives on urban freight policies: a Q-analysis on urban consolidation centres in the Netherlands. Transport 33 (4), 867-880