Review of sustainability assessments in city logistics from holistic perspective: critical insights, gaps, and future directions

The existing reviews of sustainability assessments in city logistics are limited due to being confined to addressing only one or a few research aspects and lacking a holistic perspective. Comprehensive review is crucial and missing, thereby resulting in a fragmented research landscape. Through a systematic literature review, this research aimed to analyze and synthesize the complete research spectrum of sustainability assessments in city logistics, covering research applications, method choice, indicator selection, sustainability coverage, and key research findings, to offer holistic and critical research insights, identify gaps, and propose future directions. In total, this study identified eight research themes and thirteen related sub-themes under city logistics sustainability assessment research in which “transport” and “collaboration” are the most addressed research themes. In almost all research themes, results revealed the prevalence of “indicator system” method group, except “transport” and “planning” in which “performance evaluation model” and “multi-criteria decision-making” method groups are preferred. Among the three sustainability dimensions, “economic” is the most addressed, followed by “environment” whereas “social” is often neglected. This study observed the heterogeneity in assessment indicator selection among existing studies, outlining that sustainability issues in city logistics are not well represented under current research practices. Through in-depth review analysis, this study also identified fifteen most frequently addressed city logistics sustainability initiatives among existing studies and discussed their solution effectiveness on various sustainability issues. Finally, future research directions are proposed based on identified gaps to assist researchers in further advancing the research knowledge and expanding the research domain. Supplementary data included in this article are Electronic Supplementary Material-1 (ESM1), Sections S1 to S9 and Electronic Supplementary Material-2 (ESM2) as follows, Electronic Supplementary Material-1 (ESM1) Section S-1 City logistics definitions Section S-1.1 References for city logistics definitions Section S-2 Detailed keywords, search strings, and eligibility criteria Section S-3 Detailed list of selected literature for systematic review Section S-4 Detailed content analysis matrix Section S-4.1 Codes used in content analysis matrix form Section S-5 Detailed content analysis results Section S-6 Detailed description on research themes and sub-themes Section S-7 Detailed assessment methods results Section S-8 Detailed assessment indicators results Section S-9 Detailed results on different groups of sustainability initiatives and their solution effectiveness