Last-mile logistics is an essential yet highly expensive component of city logistics responsible for many nuisances in urban areas. Mobile access hubs are flexible consolidation and transshipment points aiming at creating more sustainable city logistics systems by dynamically using urban space as logistics facilities. In this paper, we examine the potential of mobile access hub deployments for urban parcel logistics by identifying the impact of design parameters on economic and environmental performance. We propose a mathematical modeling framework and an integer program to assess the performance of mobile access hub deployments, and study the impact of a set of design parameters through synthetic cases and an illustrative case inspired from a large parcel express carrier’s operations. Results indicate design flexibility relative to the location of hubs and pronounced advantages in highly variable environments. The illustrative case shows significant savings potential in terms of cost and time efficiency as well as environmental sustainability. It emphasizes a trade-off between operational efficiency and environmental sustainability that can be balanced to achieve global sustainability goals while being economically sound.

Supply chains now cope with a lot of uncertainties, and their stakeholders are intensely interconnected, revealing new opportunities at a tremendous pace. In this context, companies must rethink their decision support systems to remain competitive. Particularly strategic supply chain capacity planning systems that should ensure resource availability. Unfortunately, existing systems do not satisfactorily consider this new deal. Therefore, this paper develops a conceptual framework providing guidelines for designing a decision support system for strategic supply chain capacity planning under uncertainty. To validate the conceptual framework, a decision support system has been designed accordingly, and two industrial experiments have been conducted.