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Urban Freight Transport and City Logistics
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Urban Freight Transport and City Logistics

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Transportation".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 February 2023) | Viewed by 16405

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Sang Hwa Song

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Graduate School of logistics, Incheon National University, Incheon 22012, Korea
Interests: last-mile logistics; e-commerce fulfillment; smart logistics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Taesu Cheong

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Industrial and Management Engineering, Korea University, Seoul 02841, Republic of Korea
Interests: supply chain management; supply chain; sustainable logistics; decision making under uncertainty; value of information; intelligent transportation; systems; healthcare
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In recent years, the proliferation of e-commerce business models has helped customers to access product information online easily and receive products they ordered whenever and wherever they want. As customers are accustomed to e-commerce services, it becomes crucial to improve the quality of such services. Businesses are trying to differentiate their services by competitively offering various delivery options such as next-day delivery, same-day delivery, and instant delivery within an hour. In addition, offline retailers are investing heavily in their existing offline retail spaces and have started to provide omnichannel services to compete with online counterparts. Start-up companies equipped with creative ideas have jumped into the on-demand business competition and successfully attracted customers with highly customized solutions.

E-commerce and the associated on-demand business models require different ways of fulfilling customer orders compared to the traditional logistics systems. To stay competitive, businesses need to deliver smaller orders more frequently to customers spread across areas, which makes it challenging to achieve economies of scale. The lower density of customer locations restricts the consolidation of orders in larger transportation lots, and the increased service expectations with reduced order lead times confines the design options from which to choose. In addition, freight transportation and order delivery in urban areas tend to aggravate road congestion and air pollution. Therefore, businesses need to devise ways of providing environmentally friendly logistics solutions. Thus, the effective integration of logistics and supply chain management with sustainability is necessary to resolve the complicated problems of urban logistics systems.

To deal with the problems in the aforementioned urban logistics environment, wise investment in automation and intelligent algorithms for the logistics systems are critical. By carefully incorporating the existing urban infrastructures with logistics facilities, efficient and sustainable freight transportation is expected to become possible. Furthermore, novel business models such as crowd-sourced delivery systems, sharing economy, and digital logistics platforms will supplement the current urban logistics systems and contribute to achieving the sustainable growth of on-demand business models. Combining research ideas in logistics and supply chain management, operations research, computer science, and transport engineering is necessary to provide differentiated solutions.

We invite you to submit papers for this Special Issue. Relevant research topics are listed below, which are illustrative and not exhaustive. Any relevant papers in the broad areas of logistics innovations in urban areas are welcome.

  • Network design for e-commerce logistics;
  • Optimization models for urban freight and logistics systems;
  • The economic analysis of urban logistics systems;
  • Sharing economy models for urban delivery services;
  • Operation analysis at fulfillment centers;
  • Business model design of e-commerce fulfillment services;
  • The urban freight consolidation center and its operations;
  • The analysis of last-mile delivery models in urban areas;
  • Microfulfillment services for the quick delivery of e-commerce;
  • Inventory management models for e-commerce;
  • Demand forecasting for urban logistics operations;
  • Digital platforms for crowd-sourced urban freight delivery.

Prof. Dr. Sang Hwa Song
Prof. Dr. Taesu Cheong
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • urban freight transport
  • urban logistics
  • city logistics
  • last-mile delivery
  • fulfillment service

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

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13 pages, 6152 KiB  
Article
Developing a Decision-Making Process of Location Selection for Truck Public Parking Lots in Korea
by Maowei Chen, Tingting Zhao, Jungwook Lee and Hyangsook Lee
Sustainability 2023, 15(2), 1467; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15021467 - 12 Jan 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1234
Abstract
As the number of truck registrations and the traffic volume have increased continuously in urban areas, the problem of truck illegal parking on the roadside has become more serious in Korea. Although the government presented the necessity and the construction plan of the [...] Read more.
As the number of truck registrations and the traffic volume have increased continuously in urban areas, the problem of truck illegal parking on the roadside has become more serious in Korea. Although the government presented the necessity and the construction plan of the truck public parking lots through the ‘4th Comprehensive Plan for Expansion of Truck Resting Facilities’, there is no detailed guideline for the local government of where to construct them. The previous studies on the location selection of the parking lots have mainly focused on passenger cars and buses, but not trucks, and the process for candidate location selection was not mentioned. To fill this gap, this study presents a decision-making process for the location selection of truck public parking lots in urban areas based on mixed-integer programming; it includes a candidate location selection by spatial analysis and an optimal location determination by the application of the competitive p-median algorithm. A case study of Incheon was conducted to validate the presented decision-making process. This study introduced a systematic decision-making process that includes standards establishment, data processing, and methodology application; it is universalistic enough to be utilized as a guideline for the government to efficiently construct truck public parking lots. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Freight Transport and City Logistics)
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15 pages, 3205 KiB  
Article
Pricing of the Bus-Truck Co-Delivery Mode of Last Mile Delivery Considering Social Welfare Maximization
by Yunzhu He
Sustainability 2023, 15(1), 376; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15010376 - 26 Dec 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1458
Abstract
In order to solve the problems of low delivery efficiency and high cost at the end of express delivery, and the impact of express trucks on urban road traffic, the co-delivery mode of trucks and buses is proposed. In this mode, without affecting [...] Read more.
In order to solve the problems of low delivery efficiency and high cost at the end of express delivery, and the impact of express trucks on urban road traffic, the co-delivery mode of trucks and buses is proposed. In this mode, without affecting the normal operation of the bus, it uses the idle resources of the bus to cooperate with the trucks to complete the delivery. The express company pays the bus delivery service fee to the bus operator, so as to improve the revenue of the bus operator. At the same time, the delivery efficiency can be improved, the express delivery cost can be reduced, and the impact of express trucks on urban traffic can be lower. A two-layer optimization model is constructed to solve the bus delivery service pricing and express space-time path selection scheme under the co-delivery mode. An example analysis is carried out through the actual bus routes and express delivery demand in Dalian. The results show that the co-delivery mode can provide consumers with more efficient services, reduce costs for express companies, provide additional revenue for bus operators, and improve social welfare. Unless the timeliness of delivery is extremely considered, the measure of using the co-delivery mode is better than the measure of relaxing restrictions on express delivery vehicles. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Freight Transport and City Logistics)
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13 pages, 923 KiB  
Article
A Freight Transportation Network Model with a New Bundling Option
by Young-Soo Myung and Yung-Mok Yu
Sustainability 2022, 14(13), 7556; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14137556 - 21 Jun 2022
Viewed by 974
Abstract
A bundling option in a freight transportation network model enables a certain amount of goods to be sent after grouping them into a bundle. Usually, each bundle occupies the space of a unit good and/or can be transshipped using a more economical transportation [...] Read more.
A bundling option in a freight transportation network model enables a certain amount of goods to be sent after grouping them into a bundle. Usually, each bundle occupies the space of a unit good and/or can be transshipped using a more economical transportation mode, which results in reduced transportation costs and carbon emissions. As bundling and unbundling also incur costs, it is important to use the bundling option in an economical way. Several freight transportation network models were developed to find an optimal bundling strategy that minimizes the total cost. The existing models assume that bundling and unbundling can be performed at all nodes, including transshipping nodes. However, in many applications, goods are bundled at the supply node and are not unbundled until they arrive at the demand node. A new model, proposed herein, allows bundling only at the supply nodes and unbundling at the demand nodes. We investigated the complexity of the new model and developed a solution method. Furthermore, we analyzed how the total cost is affected by the new assumption. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Freight Transport and City Logistics)
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22 pages, 7097 KiB  
Article
Estimation of the Origin-Destination Matrix for Trucks That Use Highways: A Case Study in Chile
by Franco Basso, Raúl Pezoa, Nicolás Tapia and Mauricio Varas
Sustainability 2022, 14(5), 2645; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14052645 - 24 Feb 2022
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2298
Abstract
Nowadays, freight transport is crucial in the functioning of cities worldwide. To dig further into the understanding of urban freight transport movements, in this research, we conducted a case study in which we estimated an origin-destination matrix for the trucks traveling on Autopista [...] Read more.
Nowadays, freight transport is crucial in the functioning of cities worldwide. To dig further into the understanding of urban freight transport movements, in this research, we conducted a case study in which we estimated an origin-destination matrix for the trucks traveling on Autopista Central, one of Santiago de Chile’s most important urban highways. To do so, we used full real-world vehicle-by-vehicle information of freight vehicles’ movements along the highway. This data was collected from several toll collection gates equipped with free-flow and automatic vehicle identification technology. However, this data did not include any vehicle information before or after using the highway. To estimate the origins and destinations of these trips, we proposed a multisource methodology that used GPS information provided by SimpliRoute, a Chilean routing company. Nevertheless, this GPS data involved only a small subset of trucks that used the highway. In order to reduce the bias, we built a decision tree model for estimating the trips’ origin, whose input data was complemented by other public databases. Furthermore, we computed trip destinations using proportionality factors obtained from SimpliRoute data. Our results showed that most of the estimated origins belonged to outskirt municipalities, while the estimated destinations were mainly located in the downtown area. Our findings might help improve freight transport comprehension in the city, enabling the implementation of focused transport policies and investments to help mitigate negative externalities, such as congestion and pollution. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Freight Transport and City Logistics)
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Review

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27 pages, 1175 KiB  
Review
Sustainable Urban Last-Mile Logistics: A Systematic Literature Review
by Vasco Silva, António Amaral and Tânia Fontes
Sustainability 2023, 15(3), 2285; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15032285 - 26 Jan 2023
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 9130
Abstract
Globalisation, urbanisation and the recent COVID-19 pandemic has been raising the demand for logistic activities. This change is affecting the entire supply chain, especially the last-mile step. This step is considered the most expensive and ineffective part of the supply chain and a [...] Read more.
Globalisation, urbanisation and the recent COVID-19 pandemic has been raising the demand for logistic activities. This change is affecting the entire supply chain, especially the last-mile step. This step is considered the most expensive and ineffective part of the supply chain and a source of negative economic, environmental and social externalities. This article aims to characterise the sustainable urban last-mile logistics research field through a systematic literature review (N = 102). This wide and holistic review was organised into six thematic clusters that identified the main concepts addressed in the different areas of the last-mile research and the existence of 14 solutions, grouped into three types (vehicular, operational, and organisational solutions). The major findings are that there are no ideal last-mile solutions as their limitations should be further explored by considering the so-called “triple bottom line of sustainability”; the integration and combination of multiple last-mile alternative concepts; or by establishing collaboration schemes that minimise the stakeholders’ conflicting interests. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Urban Freight Transport and City Logistics)
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