Other papers deal with the planning of City Logistics Service Providers’ (LSP) activities with two main purposes.
The first one is to support City Logistics service providers in performing a reliable and efficient service, while reducing costs. This is the main task of vehicle routing problems.
In particular, the reliability of the service is related to the number of timely deliveries.
Thus, several new models consider congestion and travel time variations in urban areas, in order to avoid congested links and to respect delivery time windows. (Jiang & Mahmassani, 2013; Ehmke et Al., 2012; and Crainic, 2010).
The second purpose focuses on the environmental sustainability of urban freight deliveries.
LSPs play an important role to provide green services and products. Recently, new strategies and collaborations focus on the reduction of the impact of urban goods distribution on the environment.
In particular, several studies investigate new solutions that allow to minimize the amount of CO2 emitted (Kara et al., 2007; Jabali et al., 2012; Figliozzi, 2011; Rossi et al., 2013).