The Influence of New Information Technologies in Supply Chains Logistics on Mobility in Urban Areas

Cities are places of countless logistics processes, i.e. the processes of flow of all kinds of resources: human, material, information. The basic problem of contemporary cities are factors limiting their sustainable development. Most of them originate from excessive congestion caused by individual motorization and road freight transport. In recent years, supply chains intensively develop and implement new information technologies. That aims at rationalizing the business logistics processes by improving the information flows which is followed by reducing the demand for physical resources and the reduction of processing time and costs. Because the cities are large areas of logistics processes related to the economic activities of enterprises, the purpose of this article is to answer the following question: how do new information technologies, used in logistics processes, influence the structure of resources mobility in urban areas and how they can help in solving problems of congestion in urban areas. The main assumption of the study is that information flows can partially substitute real flows, which leads to the main thesis of the research that new technologies which streamline the flows of information in B2B and B2C relation can reduce the demand for goods and human flows within the cities. That rationalization translates into changes of resources demand structure and thus a change in demand for their mobility. The study used analysis and deduction method based on the literature and real life examples in the field of information technology which are already in use and those that can be used soon in logistics processes. This field of research is underdeveloped because logisticians focus their research on economization of business logistics processes and do not pay much attention to how they can influence urban areas.