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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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ABSTRACT

Intermodal Transport (IT) allows savings in energy, time and costs, improves the quality of services and supports sustainable development of the transport system. In order to make IT more competitive it is necessary to support the development of intermodal transport terminal (ITT), whereby it is very important to make adequate decision on its location. This paper proposes a framework for the selection of the ITT location which would be most appropriate for the various stakeholders (investors, users, administration and residents). They often have conflicting goals and interests, so it is necessary to define a large number of criteria for the evaluation. A novel hybrid MCDM model that combines fuzzy Delphi, fuzzy Delphi based fuzzy ANP (fuzzy DANP) and fuzzy Delphi based fuzzy Višekriterijumska Optimizacija i kompromisno Rešenje (fuzzy DVIKOR) methods is developed in this paper with the aim of providing support to decision makers. The model is developed in the fuzzy environment in order to overcome the ambiguity and uncertainty of the decision makers’ evaluations of the criteria, sub-criteria and alternatives. The validity and applicability of the model is demonstrated by successfully resolving the problem of selecting the location of the ITT in the City of Belgrade.

Multicriteria decision making (MCDM) is a field that helps decision makers evaluate alternatives based on multiple criteria and encompasses scoring, distance-based, pairwise comparison, and outranking methods. Recent developments have aimed to solve specific problems and overcoming the limitations of previous methods. This paper proposes a new axial-distance-based aggregated measurement (ADAM) method, which is used in combination with the best-worst method (BWM) to evaluate agri-food circular economy (CE)-based business models (BMs) to create a more sustainable and efficient system for producing and consuming food. This paper proposes nine BMs, which were evaluated against eight criteria. The BWM method was used to obtain the criteria weights, while the ADAM method was used to obtain a final ranking of the BMs. The results indicate that a sustainable circular agri-food supply chain is a BM that can bring companies the most significant progress in business and strengthen their position in the market. We concluded that the ADAM method is effective for solving MCDM problems and that, overall, the model is an effective tool for solving the problem defined in this study. The main contributions are the development of a new MCDM method and a hybrid model, the establishment of the framework for evaluation and selection of CE-based BMs, and the identification of the most important ones.

Technological innovations from the last few years, in the combination with city logistics (CL) initiatives, make the definition of novel, complex, sustainable CL solutions possible. Unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) as a technology attracted lots of attention in the literature. Various researches focused on different drone-based delivery approaches, but there are only a few articles dealing with drones as the elements of complex CL concepts. The goal of this paper is to evaluate different drone-based CL concepts. Based on the existing ideas of drone application in delivery, the main group of CL concepts and their variants are defined, which represents the main contribution of the article. The evaluation and ranking of concepts are performed from the aspect of all CL stakeholders and the defined set of criteria by applying measurement of alternatives and ranking according to compromise solution (MARCOS) multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) method in spherical fuzzy environment, which represents another contribution of the article. The results indicate that the potentially best CL concept, with the final score of 0.408, is the one that refers to the transformation of the logistics system into a two-echelon system with the implementation of micro-consolidation centers (MCCs), in which the delivery of goods to MCCs is realized with rail transportation mode and the last delivery phase with drones. It is followed by the concepts that imply MCCs, and rail transportation in the function of mobile depots for drone launching and MCCs and ground delivery vehicles (GDVs), with the final scores of 0.395 and 0.390, respectively.