Decision Support Systems for Urban Logistics Planning: Multi-Stakeholder and Participative Approaches

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainability will publish a Special Issue focusing on recent developments in the field of “Decision Support Systems for Urban Logistics Planning”. The goal is to compile state-of-the art research, spanning modeling, theory, empirical studies, applications, and case studies in this research area. We seek contributions that are rigorously executed, clearly and succinctly written, addressing contemporary challenges.

With the growth of the population share living in urban areas, over recent decades, interest and awareness in urban transport activities (often referred to as urban logistics) has been growing steadily, in both the research environment and in a wider policy context. Significantly, advances in urban logistics operations and improved local authority planning are seen as essential in order to alleviate the associated negative environmental and economic impacts occurring in cities.

Several types of actors and stakeholders are therefore involved in such urban logistics management processes. Among them, freight carriers and shippers are interested in minimizing freight logistics costs in order to maximize their profits, while maintaining a competitive level of service to their customers. City administrators and residents are oriented towards a decrease in traffic congestion, social costs and environmental nuisances, even though they are often direct beneficiaries of high quality delivery services. This leads to a multitude of differing and possibly conflicting objectives that are involved in urban freight transport planning and decision making, yielding a high level of complexity and providing a strong motivation for the development of tools for helping decision-makers to reach higher grades of efficiency.

Until recently, despite growing interest and awareness of freight transport operations at local authority level, many urban transportation authorities have often overlooked freight; at the same time, despite an increasing number of advanced models and powerful algorithms presented in the literature for optimizing Urban Logistics, planning-oriented Decision Support Systems (DSSs) are seldom considered by private and public agents as a concrete option to enhance the quality of real-world decision-making process. This is partly due to the fact that these models and methods rarely incorporate a multi-stakeholder perspective in their analysis, often resulting in centralised and hierarchical decision-making procedures that might be of little help in contexts where a more participatory approach is required.

Within this context, this special issue is aimed at publishing contributions that deal with the practical application of Decision Support Systems to real-world problems arising in Urban Logistics. These include (but are not limited to):

• Multi-Criteria Decision-Making approaches for Urban planning;
• Stakeholders engagement and participatory Decision-Making techniques;
• Advanced mathematical modelling for Urban Logistics optimization;
• Facility location for Urban Logistics;
• Methods and Models for Reverse logistics optimisation in Urban contexts;
• Risk management in Urban Logistics;
• Financial implications of Urban Logistics solutions;
• Social and Environmental Sustainability Evaluation of Urban Logistics solutions;
• Integration of Decision Models and Geographical Information Systems;
• Forecasting approaches for Urban Logistics;
• Case studies concerning practical applications of Urban Logistics solutions.

All manuscripts should be submitted electronically via the online system. The submission deadline is September 30, 2018. The plan is to publish the Special Issue in early 2019. Researchers from all relevant disciplines are invited to consider this special issue as an outlet to publish their quality work on this topic of increasing significance. Inquiries on the Special Issue can be directed to the Guest Editors ([email protected]; [email protected]).

Acknowledgments: This Special Issue will be partially supported by the project "Promoting Sustainable Freight Transport in Urban Contexts: Policy and Decision-Making Approaches (ProSFeT)", funded by the H2020-MSCA-RISE-2016 programme (Grant Number: 734909)

Dr. Andrea Genovese
Dr. Antonino Sgalambro
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.

• Urban Logistics
• Decision Support Systems
• Multi-Criteria Decision Making
• Stakeholders Engagement