Evaluation of Smart City Logistics Solutions

The negative effects of goods flows realisation are most visible in urban areas as the places of the greatest concentration of economic and social activities. The main goals of this article were to identify the applicable Industry 4.0 technologies for performing various city logistics (CL) operations, establish smart sustainable CL solutions (SSCL) and rank them in order to identify those which will serve as the base points for future plans and strategies for the development of smart cities. This kind of problem requires involvement of multiple stakeholders with their opposing goals and interests, and thus multiple criteria. For solving it, this article proposed a novel hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model, based on BWM (Best-Worst Method) and CODAS (COmbinative Distance-based ASsessment) methods in grey environment. The results of the model application imply that the potentially best SSCL solution is based on the combination of the concepts of micro-consolidation centres and autonomous vehicles with the support of artificial intelligence and Internet of Things technologies. The main contributions of the article are the definition of original SSCLs, the creation of a framework and definition of criteria for their evaluation and the development of a novel hybrid MCDM model.