The U-TURN project aims at addressing freight urban distribution, focusing on food logistics. The project will contribute to our understanding of freight distribution in urban areas, especially addressing the special requirements and needs of food transportation, and will suggest innovative collaboration practices and tools towards achieving more efficient operations from both an environmental and cost perspective. The project will analyse existing freight urban flows, identify synergies and winning logistics sharing and collaboration strategies and will assess them in three ways: through comparative analysis based on actual market data, through simulation experimentation and via pilot execution in four different countries: Germany, UK, Italy and Greece. U-TURN will further contribute to the adoption of these strategies through managerial assessment, quantifiable benefits and the provision of tools, including a "smart" transport matching tool, a collaboration platform, a simulation tool and economic assessment model. The project aims to exploit the opportunities that currently exist for consolidation of transportation flows from food manufacturers to the various point-of-sales located in urban areas, as well as from local food producers and online retailers directly to consumers, and the high industrial interest behind this topic.

The Cranfield IMRC vision is to grow the existing world class research activity through the development and interaction between:Manufacturing Technologies and Product/Service Systems that move UK manufacturing up the value chain to provide high added value manufacturing business opportunities.This research vision builds on the existing strengths and expertise at Cranfield and is complementary to the activities at other IMRCs. It represents a unique combination of manufacturing research skills and resource that will address key aspects of the UK's future manufacturing needs. The research is multi-disciplinary and cross-sectoral and is designed to promote knowledge transfer between sectors. To realise this vision the Cranfield IMRC has two interdependent strategic aims which will be pursued simultaneously:1.To produce world/beating process and product technologies in the areas of precision engineering and materials processing.2.To enable the creation and exploitation of these technologies within the context of service/based competitive strategies.