PrefaceUrban logistics is a wide studied subject. Indeed, since more than 20 years, several researchers and practitioners deal daily with different issues concerning planning and management of urban freight transport systems. Nowadays, two definitions of city/urban logistics are retained. The first is that of Taniguchi et al. (2001) who define city logistics as ''the process for totally optimizing the logistics and transport activities by private companies in urban areas while considering the traffic environment, the traffic congestion and energy consumption within the framework of a market economy''. The second, more related to the vision of Ambrosini and Routhier (2004) and Anderson et al. (2005), is not related to the notion of optimization but to organization. In this sense, we can define urban logistics as the pluridisciplinary field that aims to understand, study and analyze the different organizations, logistics schemes, stakeholders and planning actions related to the improvement of the different goods transport systems in an urban zone and link them in a synergic way to decrease the main nuisances related to it. Although the field has been studied for almost 40 years, it is only at the end of the Twentieth Century that we observe the main coordinated actions of research having a direct impact into practice Nowadays, we can observe thousands of specific actions in urban logistics, many directly issued from research programs, but not all of them are still operational. This is mainly due to the different stakeholders that are seen in urban logistics, as well as the wide variety of aims and stakes and to the consequent difficulties to pursuit collaborative actions. Public stakeholders (politicians, city planners, public transport managers, regional or national technical services) are on a collective welfare vision and aim to reduce the main nuisance attributed to freight transport, i.e., congestion, pollution, global warming and noise without penalizing urban areas and also while creating employment when possible. Private stakeholders (shippers, transport and logistics operators, retailers, wholesalers, craftsmen, real state stakeholders, tertiary activities, etc.) are on an economic efficiency vision and aim to reduce costs and/or increase service quality, of course with an eye on the environment but not as a primordial criterion. It is clear that for each stakeholder the notion of sustainability is not the same. Although all of them refer to the Kyoto protocol, the importance that they give to each of its components (economic, environmental and social) is not the same, and it is often difficult to provide a unified vision to compare proposals and solutions. Furthermore, those v issues are amplified due to the high constrained environment of urban goods transport and the interaction that it makes with personal transport (although goods transport is often indicated as source of nuisance, it is proven that its inefficiency is a consequence of the nuisances personal transport have on goods transport).In this ...
