Directions for future research on urban mobility and city logistics

This survey article provides an overview on future directions for research in urban mobility and city logistics. It sets a focus on three particularly serious changes in the business models: vehicle autonomy, crowdsourced logistics, and urban micro-consolidation centers. In the future, service fleets might fully or partially be autonomous which brings new operational opportunities and challenges. In many business models, crowdsourcing jobs are already common. While this might save costs, it also leads to uncertainty in the available workforce and their behavior. Finally, micro-consolidation centers enable the use of smaller, cheaper, and emission-friendlier vehicles, but lead to more complex planning and operations. For each topic, the article presents an overview on the relevant literature as well as important and open research challenges.