Collaborative urban transportation: Recent advances in theory and practice

Increasing urbanization has turned transporting freight from, to, and within urban areas into a major challenge. Freight transportation represents a lifeline for urban retail and industry, but causes significant negative impacts on the quality of living in urban areas in terms of congestion, emissions and space consumption. City logistics initiatives have long suggested the need for collaborative and environmentally friendly urban transportation that could alleviate the negative impacts of urban transportation, but these face organizational and technological challenges of collaboration. Given technological advancements and innovative business models, concepts of collaborative urban transportation could contribute to a future paradigm of more sustainable and customer-friendly urban transportation.

In this work, we collect and discuss contributions to collaborative freight transportation in urban areas with focus on recent publications (i.e. those published over the past ten years). We particularly analyze vertical and horizontal approaches of collaboration from an operations research perspective and point out strategic, tactical, and operational planning problems and solution approaches. To highlight research gaps and future research opportunities, we present innovative examples of collaborative urban transportation and analyze factors of failure and success. Collecting recent advances in theory and practice of collaborative urban transportation allows us to distill alternative visions of future collaborative freight transportation in urban areas.