Who is in Favor of off-hour Deliveries to Brussels Supermarkets? Applying Multi Actor Multi Criteria Analysis (MAMCA) to Measure Stakeholder Support

Abstract

Today, the majority of deliveries in urban areas take place during the day at times when roads are already congested with other vehicles. In theory, shifting some of these deliveries to off-hours would decrease both traffic pressure during high traffic periods as well as the time needed to carry out deliveries. However, research has shown that there are also negative effects and that different stakeholders have very different points of view. Until today, the pros and cons have not been examined from the perspective of the various stakeholders. The questions at stake are whether in certain situations there is overall stakeholder support for a shift to off-hour deliveries and how we can assess this support. This paper presents Multi Actor Multi Criteria Analysis (MAMCA) (Macharis, 2005) as the appropriate tool for measuring support for urban off-hour deliveries and describes the application of this methodology to a case study of a large food retailer in Brussels. MAMCA is an extension of the widely used Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA), and it explicitly includes the goals and objectives of all stakeholders when evaluating a set of alternatives. The analysis reveals that, in Brussels, a shift to off-hour deliveries to supermarkets should receive overall support because there are no scenarios that score very high for one stakeholder and very low for another and the scenarios that envision a high proportion of night deliveries receive a high score. The retailer prefers a scenario with an even delivery distribution throughout the day, while the other two stakeholders prefer more morning deliveries.