Purpose: The last decades have witnessed an increased interest in urban logistics originating from both the research and the practitioners’ communities. Sustainable freight transports today are on the political, social and technological agenda of many actors operating in urban contexts. Due to the extent of the covered areas and the continuous progress in many fields, the resulting body of research on urban logistics appears quite fragmented. From an engineering management perspective, the purpose of this paper is to present a systematic literature review (SLR) that aims to consolidate the knowledge on urban logistics, analyse the development of the discipline, and provide future research directions.Design/methodology/approach: The paper discusses the main evidence emerging from a SLR on urban logistics. The corpus resulting from the SLR has been used to perform a citation network analysis and a main path analysis that together underpin the identification of the most investigated topics and methodologies in the field.Findings: Through the analysis of a corpus of 104 articles, the most important research contributions on urban logistics that represent the structural backbone in the development of the research over time in the field are detected. Based on these findings, this work identifies and discusses three areas of potential interest for future research.Originality/value: This paper presents an SLR related to a research area in which the literature is extremely fragmented. The results provide insights about the research path, current trends and future research directions in the field of urban logistics.

Many innovative technologies have been successfully adopted in logistics and supply chain management processes to increase efficiency, reduce costs or enhance communication. In recent years, considerable attention from both practitioners and academics has been focused on evaluating the impacts of innovative technologies adoption. However, the current body of literature on technology adoption, implementation and evaluation in logistics is quite fragmented; thus, an updated and structured overview of the scientific literature in this field might be useful. To this end, this work presents a systematic literature review (SLR) that aims to increase the understanding of the trend toward new technologies in logistics and identify the main research trends and gaps. The principal research trends that emerged from the SLR involve the technologies, their evolution over time and their relationships with the research methodologies. The main literature gaps concern integration and communication, technology-adoption processes and differences between inbound and outbound logistics.

The online meal order and delivery business has scaled up in the last few years. The delivery process is currently performed by self-employed contractors (i.e. cyclists); however, in the future, it might be performed using drones, as some pilot tests are currently experimenting with this possibility. This paper outlines a scenario in which a fleet of drones, performing the deliveries, requires a network of strategically located charging stations to support the business. This paper shows how the strategic location of the charging stations affects the overall performance of the system, where the maximum time the customers are willing to wait is limited. To this end, an optimisation model addressing the trade-off between the number of stations and the coverage of the demand is presented. Although not imminent, due to technology and regulatory constraints, this scenario and the formulated model can open new perspectives in the delivery process of meals and other goods.