Analysing the impacts of technology in City Logistics projects

City Logistics is a new field of study that is gaining more and more attention from society because the externalities caused by urban freight transport are significant. This thesis wants to identify which technologies and innovations are the most used to manage these activities in urban areas, what their impacts are on project results and to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each technology. The starting point of this thesis is the analysis of different literature reviews in which some research gaps are found, like the lack of interest in the impacts caused by these technologies, and this work aims to contribute to filling them up. The methodology used consists of a two-steps approach. The first one is the identification of city logistics projects for detecting which technologies were used and which results were obtained. The second step is to assess the impacts that these technologies might cause by looking at specific scientific articles. In this kind of documents, it is easier to gather detailed and trustable information about the single solution used in the project. The output of this thesis is a dataset, in the form of two tables, including information about the impacts of the most important technologies deployed and the summary of different City Logistics projects results carried out in recent years. This dataset may become a useful tool in the hands of who wants to run a new initiative in the context of Urban Logistics, like authorities, researcher groups or private companies. In fact, since the current knowledge of this thematic and previous examples of those initiatives are reported in the dataset, they can easily have access to the main results achieved and they can evaluate if the technology, once deployed, might be successful or not in their context. Finally, in a City Logistics perspective, the most studied technologies seem to be electric vehicles, cargo bikes and the concept of crowdshipping, in fact, there is already a large literature available that treat these topics, instead there are few studies about other technologies like 3D printing or autonomous delivery robot. The results show that the technologies might have positive or negative impacts on 5 macro-areas. They are the following: “Economic impacts”, “Operating impacts”, “Environmental impacts”, “Social impacts” and “Other impacts”. In this work, each technology identified is treated by discussing its relative impacts in those macro impact areas. However, since urban areas are a challenging environment for the supply chain management, taking into account that each city has a different configuration, it is possible that the results obtained by adopting the same technology in different cities are not the same, even strongly discordant.