Ever-growing globalization and industrialization put forward impending requirements for green and sustainable logistics (G&SL). Over the past decades, G&SL initiatives triggered worldwide deliberations, aiming at easing negative transport externalities and improving supply chain performance. This review-based paper attempts to offer a joint quantitative and qualitative understanding for the overall evolutionary trend, knowledge structure, and literature gaps of the G&SL research field. Employing the science mapping approach, a total of 306 major paper published from 1999 to 2019 were retrieved, elaborated on, and synthesized. Visualized statistics regarding publication years, journal allocation/co-citation, inter-country/institution collaboration, influential articles, co-occurred keywords, and time view clusters of research themes were analyzed bibliographically. On this basis, a total of 50 sub-branches of G&SL knowledge were classified and thematically discussed based on five alignments, namely (i) social-environmental-economic research, (ii) planning, policy and management, (iii) application and practice, (iv) technology, and (v) operations research. Finally, the current knowledge obstacles and the future research opportunities were suggested. The findings contribute to portray a systematic intellectual prospect for the state quo, hotspots, and academic frontiers of G&SL research. Moreover, it provides researchers and practitioners with heuristic thoughts to govern transportation ecology and logistics service quality.

The contradiction between the contribution of city logistics (CL) to sustainable urban development and its negative externalities is increasingly prominent. Policy supervision measures and the green logistics initiative are also in conflict with the management goal of logistics enterprises. Innovative solutions for CL have attracted increasing research attention worldwide. However, the description of the global research network in the field of CL, research trends, and the discussion of advanced theories and practices have not been systematically reviewed so far. Especially in the past three years, there has been an explosive growth of relevant literature. In this paper, the method of combining scientometric analysis and thematic discussion was adopted to systematically review 513 important works in the literature from 1993 to 2018, aiming to provide a holistic understanding of the status in quo, trends and gaps of CL research, and to further analyze prominent problems. The study has made statistical analyses of the publication year profile, journal allocation and research methods of the included literature, and constructed four kinds of visualized bibliographic information timeline maps for the authorship network, international collaboration network, keywords co-occurrence network and research topic clustering. Then, the three themes summarized by clustering are discussed, mainly focusing on CL strategies and policy, green supply chain management, planning methods, and advanced concepts and practices. Finally, the research gaps framework and agenda were reported. This study contributes to summarizing the research and development of city logistics on the whole, and can also serve as an explorative manual to support sustainable urban freight activities and innovative research.

The lack of practical application and accurate benefit analysis, which are the prerequisites for each other, make it difficult to implement and promote the underground logistics system (ULS), although in theory people always recognize its advantages in sustainable improvement of urban transportation and logistics. This paper attempts to use the system dynamics (SD) method, based on the real-world simulation, to analyze the quantitative relationship between the implementation strategy of ULS and the sustainability of urban transportation and logistics to solve this problem. Beijing city, China, was selected as the empirical background. Four ULS implementation strategies were proposed according to the city’s potential investment in ULS and its demand for ULS network capacity. Meanwhile, four representative indicators were selected to evaluate the simulation results, including the average speed of the road networks in the peak hour, congestion loss, delivery travel time in the peak hour and the PM emissions of the truck. Good fitting index of historical data shows the validity of the model. Simulation results show that ULS, as a supplement to the urban integrated transport system, can significantly improve urban traffic and logistics. This study provides a perspective in the systematic and quantitative analysis of ULS to support the urban sustainable development.