A Literature Review of City Logistics Assessment and Evaluation Methodologies

Scholars and practitioners have adopted a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative methodologies to assess and evaluate City Logistics (CL) projects. Traditionally, the aim of CL assessment was to solve optimization problems and thus depicting the response of private actors to the introduction of public policies. Other methodologies, such as Multi-criteria Decision Making models (MCDM) or survey-based methods, have been put forward in recent years with the evaluation objective in mind. More in general, CL assessment and evaluation should take into account the many stakeholders that are affected by the introduction of new CL policies. In this chapter a literature review aimed at providing insights into the ability of existing methods taking into account the objectives of various stakeholders is proposed. Moreover, existing literature will be addressed in terms of quantitative vs. qualitative methodologies, so as to highlight the strengths and potential shortcomings of both approaches in relation to the CL assessment goal.