Delphi study reveals strong adoption of digital logistics technologies alongside lagging knowledge management processes in urban freight, suggesting human attitudes remain a key bottleneck.
Initiatives taken in the area of city logistics are still not effective enough. A solution to this problem may be more intensive development and wide application of the knowledge-based city logistics approach. This paper aims to evaluate the current development trends and challenges in city logistics, focusing on emerging technologies and knowledge-based processes. The study was conducted using the Delphi method. The findings show an expert consensus on the future common use of several technologies such as ICT, IoT, AI, big data, and drones. Autonomous vehicles constitute an exception here, as the experts do not expect them to be in common use in the future. It can be expected that city logistics projects and activities will be more data-driven, whereas processes necessary for effective knowledge management, which to a large extent depend on people’s attitude, will not be strengthened. Identifying these processes as unlikely indicates the necessary way forward.
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Wagner et al. (2025) studied this question.
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