Assessing the Contribution of Urban Freight Terminals in Last Mile Operations

Abstract

This paper introduces a multi-stakeholder multi-criteria evaluation framework, which can be used for the assessment of the last mile distribution performance of urban freight terminals. To this end, a comparative analysis is conducted addressing two Greek urban intermodal freight terminals located at the port of Thessaloniki (ThPA) and Kuehne+Nagel (K+N)’s premises. The assessment of the terminals’ performance relies on a tailored multi-criteria Key Performance Indicator (KPI)-based evaluation framework, whereas the selection and significance of the incorporated criteria and KPIs is predetermined by the relevant responsible stakeholders, who imposed their viewpoint through an analytic hierarchy process. Results showed that ThPA was ranked first according to its performance pertaining to the role of an intermodal interchange; still, K+N’s performance index was only 8.5% lower than ThPA’s, while in specific KPIs it seems that it performs in a better way.

Keywords

• freight terminals
• last mile
• key performance indicators
• multi-stakeholder
• multi-criteria
• sensitivy analysis
• ahp
• promethee
• gaia