Sustainability of urban logistics or last-mile logistics (LML) has been extensively studied from the perspective of experts and professionals whose objectives and interests have been closely linked to their organisations. For this reason, the conclusions drawn from these studies have had an inherent bias that is difficult to overlook. The aim of this study is to identify perceived research priorities in sustainable urban logistics through an innovative approach based on weightings established by a ‘university community’. To carry out this study, a hybrid multi-criteria model is proposed, used to weight twelve criteria employed to compare fourteen categories grouping the lines of research in LML. The main contributions of this work have therefore been: to provide an atypical perspective grounded in the ‘university community’, and to design a hybrid multi-criteria model capable of efficiently forecasting which perceived research priorities will be most relevant in the future in LML. The most significant conclusions of this study highlight the strong value that the ‘university community’ assigns to research areas in LML focused on collaborative workstreams among stakeholders. This is understood as a systemic and strategic approach grounded in the implementation of urban logistics infrastructures that enhance process efficiency through regulatory and collaborative mechanisms aimed at increasing the sustainability of LML.

One of the fundamental services for a city is the existence of an efficient urban distribution of goods that allows the needs of its citizens and businesses to be met. This service is known as last-mile urban logistics. A little-studied approach, which this work has set as a priority objective, is to determine how this logistics is strongly related to certain relevant economic factors for the companies that provide the service, the public authorities that regulate it, and the citizens who must live with it.