Managing last-mile urban freight transport through emerging information and communication technologies: a systemic literature review

Up-to-today, urban logistics has shown significant relevance around the world because of the numerous problems due to the increase in freight flows in the cities driven by the changes occurring, e.g., smaller and more frequent deliveries. The irreversibility of these processes is pushing researchers to look for theoretical and practical approaches to address changes to improve sustainability. Therefore, the need to develop new methods and models to govern urban freight transport are emerging and the evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT) have opened the road to develop and implement new advanced approaches to manage sustainable urban last-mile freight transport. In particular, they are mainly devoted to support traffic management and control, and land planning through the integrated use of ICT, which allows one to optimise freight traffic by collaborating fleet management, advanced urban supply chain integration, and so on. In order to capture the current state of research and to identify the future challenges, a systemic review is presented.