Sustainable City Logistics Management and Innovation

Dear Colleagues,

The efficient and sustainable provision of urban logistics services is becoming an increasingly important topic. Increasing urbanization and congestion have created additional pressure on the urban freight infrastructure while trends towards on-demand consumerism and rising service level expectations impose challenges for last-mile deliveries and result in additional sustainability issues.

Public and private urban logistics stakeholders are seeking innovative ways to design, implement and evaluate urban logistics policies and strategies. Advances in data science, vehicle technologies as well as new operational and business models for urban logistics offer new opportunities in this field. New forms of public–private cooperation have the potential to increase the effectiveness of policy-making in urban logistics.

This Special Issue addresses innovative approaches to sustainable city logistics management from the public and private perspectives. We welcome:

• Contributions focusing on private urban logistics strategies, including vehicle routing and scheduling for time-constrained deliveries, strategic network design of multi-echelon networks, use of multi-modal solutions and alternative vehicle technologies (such as drones or cargo-bikes), measures targeting the efficiency of the delivery process (such as parcel lockers and urban pick-up points), and new business models for last-mile deliveries including collaborative deliveries and crowd-sourcing.
• Contributions focusing on urban logistics policy-making, including public infrastructure and land use management, traffic management, regulatory measures and taxes and incentives. Papers focusing on collaborative approaches to urban logistics policy-making and various forms of stakeholder engagement are of particular interest.

We invite quantitative approaches that employ advanced optimization and simulation methods, data analytics, machine learning, choice modeling, network science or stakeholder interaction modeling to inform the strategic and operational planning of urban logistics systems. We also welcome contributions focusing on the evaluation of urban logistics policies and strategies across multiple dimensions of sustainability, including economic and environmental assessments and multi-criterial analysis. Finally, we welcome case studies detailing the applications of urban logistics policies and strategies in practice. 

Dr. Milena Janjevic
Dr. Matthias Winkenbach
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
• city logistics
• urban freight transports