Relevance of City Logistics Modelling Efforts: A Review

Abstract

This paper presents a review of city logistics (also known as urban freight transportation) modelling efforts reported in the literature for urban freight analysis. The review is based on an extensive search of the academic literature. We position the contributions in a framework that takes into account the diversity and complexity found in the present-day city logistics practice. The framework covers the fundamental aspects in the modelling selection process, including: (1) the stakeholders involved in the model, (2) the defining criteria, that is the descriptor for modelling purpose, (3) the objective of the model and (4) the solution approach implemented for achieving the objective. In our discussion and overview, we take these situational factors as the starting point for categorizing and evaluating the city logistics modelling literature. The review analyses the trends of city logistics modelling research in terms of its relevance to city logistics problems and attempts to identify missing links in modelling the urban freight domain.

Keywords:

• city logistics model
• stakeholder
• objective
• descriptor
• solution approach

Acknowledgement

We thank four anonymous referees from Transport Reviews for providing a range of very useful suggestions for improving earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

Support from Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for funding this research (Project: Sustainable Accessibility of the Randstad) is greatly acknowledged.