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City logistics aims to increase the efficiency and mitigate the negative effects of logistics processes and activities, and at the same time support the sustainable development of the urban areas. Major European and national research projects, undertaken from the end of the last century onwards, indicate that the state of the urban area logistics is quite critical. The situation requires a comprehensive analysis and active participation of the authorities and companies in order to solve the growing problems and define the sustainable solutions which would encourage the economic development and improve the living conditions in the city. In order to make logistics activities less routine, and thereby more efficient, many initiatives have been launched, especially in the terms of environmental impact and service quality. However, the changes are slow and environmental trends are setting new challenges. The main problem is the lack of planning activities and comprehensive and long term policy of city logistics. Decisions of city planners are often inadequate, without the analysis of existing situation and interaction of city logistics and complex socio-economic system of the city and its surrounding, without research and studies of different measures and impacts on the overall city logistics system. This article presented the current situation and trends in the implementation of logistics chains within the urban areas in order to highlight the complexity of solving the problems of a complex city logistics system.

Globalization and decentralization of production generate the intensive growth of goods and transport flows, mostly performed by the maritime transport. Ports, as the main nodes in the global logistics networks, are becoming congested, space for their expansion limited, and traffic in their hinterland congested. As a solution to these and many other hinterland-transport-related problems stands out the development of dry port (DP) terminals. Selection of their location is one of the most important strategic decisions on which depends their competitiveness in the market and the functionality of the logistics network. Accordingly, the evaluation and selection of locations for the development of the DP in accordance with the requirements of various stakeholders is performed in this paper, as a prerequisite for the establishment of an ecological, economic, and socially sustainable logistics network in the observed area. To solve this problem, a new hybrid model of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) that combines Delphi, AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process), and CODAS (Combinative Distance-based Assessment) methods in a grey environment is developed. The main contributions of this paper are the defined model, the problem-solving approach based on finding a compromise solution, simultaneous consideration of the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of the DP concept and its implementation in the regional international markets. The applicability of the approach and the defined MCDM model is demonstrated by solving a real-life case study of ranking the potential DP locations in the Western Balkans region. Based on the obtained results, it is concluded that in the current market conditions, it would be most realistic to open three DP terminals, in Zagreb, Ljubljana, and Belgrade.

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