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.

Sustainable urban development relies on forward-looking infrastructure development. As an emerging infrastructure system that incorporates green technologies, the Metro-based Underground Logistics System (M-ULS) enables sustainable transportation of passengers and freight within cities collaboratively by sharing rail transit network facilities. M-ULS can effectively save non-renewable energy and reduce pollution to the ecological environment, and the comprehensive benefits of the system make an outstanding contribution to sustainable urban development. The purpose of this study is to provide a systematic review of M-ULS based on different perspectives and to present the development of the M-ULS network integration concept. By employing bibliometric analysis, the four dimensions of M-ULS related literature are statistically analyzed to discover the knowledge structure and research trends. Through thematic discussions, a development path for developing the concept of M-ULS network integration was established. The main findings of this study are summarized as follows: (i) A comparative analysis shows that the metro system has a high potential for freight use; (ii) Improvements in metro freight technologies are conducive to urban economy, environment, and social sustainability; (iii) Network expansion is an inevitable trend for implementing underground logistics based on the metro; (iv) The interaction among public sectors, metro operators, logistics corporations, and users plays a critical role in promoting the development of M-ULS. (v) It is worth mentioning that the planning of green infrastructure should fully consider its comprehensive contribution to the sustainable development of the city. This study visualizes the current status and hotspots of M-ULS research. It also discloses frontier knowledge and novel insights for the integrated planning and operations management of metro and urban underground freight transportation.

The surging demand for logistics systems brought about by the vigorous development of e-commerce makes urban traffic more and more congested. The need for a sustainable transition in terms of urban transportation infrastructure also encourages the further innovation of logistics systems. The urban underground logistics system (ULS) emerges as a promising alternative for realizing efficient large-scale freight distribution in megacities. However, there are relatively few studies that have explored the factors that determine the uptake of ULSs in practice. This paper thus aims to identify the critical success factors of ULSs throughout project life cycle stages. Firstly, a desktop study and a study using the Delphi method were conducted to extract the critical success factors (CSFs) of ULS projects. Secondly, a questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data on the perceived significance of the selected success factors from ULS professionals. Thirdly, the intergroup comparison of the significance of CSFs and exploratory factory analysis were used to ascertain the critical factors and latent determinants influencing the development of ULS projects. In total, 36 CSFs in the four life cycle stages of ULS projects were finalized. The identified factors represent the seven latent determinants in developing a ULS project, namely, overall feasibility and acceptance of the ULS, prototype system, and business model, competence and resources for ULS construction and operation, station layout and intermodal transportation, government policies and incentives, long-term planning of the underground space and logistics network, and market investigation and forecasting. The research findings of the paper help guide practitioners and policy makers on decisions made during ULS planning and construction and provide a reference performance evaluation framework for ULS projects.

The metro-based underground logistics system (M-ULS) has been identified as an effective solution to urban problems resulting from the expansion of urban freight traffic. However, there is a paucity of current research that examines the resilience of a M-ULS in the context of unexpected events during operations. Therefore, this paper presents a methodology for assessing the resilience of the M-ULS. The method considers the propagation paths of various failures in a multi-layered, interdependent network that includes topology, functionality, facilities, and information, as well as network performance indicators based on network freight flow and logistics timeliness. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated using the case of the Nanjing Metro. The results show that the type of disruption, the duration, and the direction of train travel all have a significant impact on the resilience of the M-ULS. The method proposed in this paper provides a scientific basis for the assessment and optimization of M-ULS resilience and also offers new insights into the use of urban rail transit to promote the sustainable development of urban logistics.