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.

Developing a metro-based underground logistics system (M-ULS) to integrate freight activities into passenger rail transit networks is a sustainable option to improve urban traffic and mobility. This paper proposes innovative concepts for M-ULS prototypes. The system design uses knowledge from engineering practice, emerging initiatives, literature, and experts’ viewpoints. First, demand flows, hierarchies, and facility features of an M-ULS network are described, based on which the collaborative mechanism of shared metro passenger-goods transport, along with specialised packing and transportation strategies, are modelled and compared. Both overground and underground measures are envisaged for last-mile deliveries from metro to customers. Second, a hierarchical framework incorporating 37 key technologies that are necessary for M-ULS development is organised and evaluated. Third, interior layout schemes of a specific interchange metro station with logistics functions are designed. Underground space partitions at the platform layer and the station hall layer are visualised. The logistics workflows of the station are described in full. Evidence from literature and surveys indicates that the proposed M-ULS models are technically feasible, and their advantages and disadvantages are clear. This study contributes to providing a holistic decision support tool for the future planning and design of M-ULS and other rail-based freight transportation systems.

Underground logistics system (ULS) tends to alleviate traffic congestion, increase city logistics efficiency, mitigate the negative effects of traditional logistics processes, and improve the sustainability of urban areas. However, the relatively high cost and risk of underground construction are serious obstacles to implementing ULS. Integrating ULS into modern metro system (M‐ULS) is considered to be feasible and efficient to solve this problem. This paper aims at developing a metro system‐based ULS network planning method. First, an evaluation model of underground freight volume was proposed considering service capacity, freight flow, and regional accessibility. Second, a set of mixed integer programming model was developed to solve the problem of optimal nodes’ location‐allocation (LAP) in the network. Then, a hybrid algorithm was designed with a combination of E‐TOPSIS, exact algorithm, and heuristic algorithm. Finally, two lines of Nanjing Metro were selected as a case to validate the proposed planning method. The results showed that the new system can significantly reduce the construction costs of ULS and alleviate traffic congestion. Moreover, the potential of metro stations and underground tunnels can be fully exploited to achieve higher logistics benefits.