Scenario Planning for Logistics: An Experts’ View for 2025

2025: Factory Cities and Fusion Reactors (Scenario)
Two-thirds of all mega-cities (> 10 million residents) are located in developing countries.

Many of these cities, for example Lagos, Delhi, Bombay or Mexico City, have grown to more than 20 million inhabitants.

These concentrated centres of the world economy are gateways for people, goods, knowledge, and money and produce up to 50% of the gross domestic product of the individual country.

One of the largest challenges in logistics after the year 2020 is mega-city logistics. In some of the largest metropolitan areas there live over 20 million people, which all have to be supplied. Since inner-city traffic often comes to a standstill, standard parcel and mail deliveries require a great deal of time.

Those who need something delivered quickly resort to small special providers which offer exact time deliveries, for example per helicopter – naturally, at corresponding prices.

In most developing and emerging nations, monopoly service providers operate and provide logistics services for single districts and bundle the commodity flows to relieve at least some of the strain on the traffic situation.

Several of the controlled grown mega-cities, at least in the industrial nations, meanwhile operate underground supply networks of which the operation, maintenance, and upgrading are shared by several logistics service providers….

Agenda

• Why Futures Research and Scenarios?
• Scenario Planning in Logistics
• Design of Scenario Study for Logistics
• Probable Future 2025
• Discontinuity Analysis
• Preliminary Results of RealTime-Delphi 2008
• Next Steps