An Ex-Ante Assessment of City Distribution Alternatives Based on Multi Actor Multi Criteria Framework

Abstract

Recently, urban areas face challenges that result from negative externalities of traditional distribution networks. Especially, city actors increasingly suffer from issues as inefficient load factors in operations, traffic volume on roads, and noise pollution. To overcome these problems, modern city distribution patterns integrated with the consolidation strategy have the potential to provide satisfying solutions. Align with city actors’ expectations, alternatives of consolidation-distribution schemes can offer improvements in both economic, social, and environmental issues. In particular, this study aims at an ex-ante evaluation of city distribution alternatives on the typology of consolidation-distribution schemes ensuring win-win solutions to each city actor. This paper adopts Multi Actor Multi-Criteria Analysis (MAMCA) as a novel approach to evaluating different city actors’ objectives and a set of city distribution alternatives comprehensively. The paper results highlight that micro consolidation centre facilities can be more suitable in response to city actors’ expectations among distribution alternatives to urban consolidation centre and mobile depot. Finally, future research in this topic can focus on evaluating distribution alternatives on a sector basis and marketing types such as B2B and B2C.