Conception and validation of a decision support model for Urban Freight Transport

This paper proposes a conceptual model of the Urban Freight Transport (UFT) system to represent and especially to explain the structure of the UFT as well as the connections between its functions. Its practical scope is to provide a formality support for the development of decision-making tools in order to identify the principles of actions to develop and improve the UFT system. This work is split mainly into two parts. The first is concerned with the theoretical articulation carried out on the basis of a set of tools that allowed us to make our model emerge and to formulate hypotheses derived mostly from theoretical analyzes. The second part of this work includes the empirical study to test and validate our model in the field. To achieve this task, we adopted the Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis, which allows us to evaluate the veracity of the causal links in our model. As a result, we conducted a survey of UFT officials and users in the city of Fez. We used a hypothetical-deductive approach based on a complementary methodology between the qualitative analysis and the support of the quantitative analysis.