A review of priority criteria and decision-making methods applied in selection of sustainable city logistics initiatives and collaboration partners

Sustainable city logistics plans could significantly affect the quality of life in the urban environment. Evaluating sustainable city logistics initiatives such as urban distribution centres, congestion pricing, delivery timing and access restrictions is a complex problem since several subjective and objective criteria and constraints should be taken into account. On the other hand, collaboration partner selection in the context of the city logistics planning plays an important role in achieving operational efficiency under municipal freight regulations such as access, sizing and timing restrictions. This study identifies and reviews the applied criteria/sub-criteria, and multi-criteria decision-making techniques for sustainable city logistics initiatives selection and also collaboration partner selection problems and presents an insight into common criteria/sub-criteria and suitable multi-criteria decision-making techniques for future researches. The results of this literature review reveals that the recent papers aim at considering simultaneously technical, social, environmental and economic criteria by using analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method in the selection of sustainable city logistics initiatives. This result in collaboration partner selection section aims at considering simultaneously quality and cost criteria by using AHP method.