City logistics research streams: a systematic literature review

The pursuit of sustainable solutions for moving goods in urban areas with minimum impacts on the society and the environment is nowadays a broadly discussed subject. To better frame the research interests in this area, in this paper we discuss the main evidences emerged from a systematic literature review regarding the field of city logistics, which encompasses (but is not limited to) the transportation of goods inside and across urban centers. Following our research protocol, we collected and analyzed a corpus of papers from which we identified i) the most popular research methodologies adopted to study city logistics issues, ii) how research methodologies and topics have evolved through years, and iii) the emerging gaps. This study represents a starting point to understand the future evolution and topics to investigate concerning city logistics.