A sustainability cross-case assessment of city logistics solutions

Abstract

The assessment of smart logistics solutions performance is a complex process that takes into consideration the solution type, the stakeholders’ engagement level, and the cities’ particularities and objectives. It is performed taking into account specific evaluation criteria and indicators. This study aims to introduce a holistic sustainability-based framework for the assessment of logistics solutions based on Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis (LCSA) and multi stakeholder multi criteria decision making concept by considering four sustainability disciplines (economy, environment, mobility and society) and three enablers (solution maturity, user acceptance and user uptake). The followed process builds on data transparency and stakeholder communication, and enables decision making through aggregation of the analysis results. Evalog, an open platform, has been developed based on the framework concepts and is implemented to assess and cross-compare city logistics solutions that have been selected by twelve European city cases. The output of Evalog is the integration of all indicators in the Logistics Sustainability Index (LSI), which depicts the solution’s impact per stakeholder category and the Global LSI (GLSI), which represents the overall impact at city level. Results showed that an average improvement of 24.5% may be achieved in all criteria and city cases owing to the logistics solution.