An integrated multi-agent/system dynamics model for the assessment of City Logistics project

Urban distribution is one of the most expensive and impacting portion of a supply chain, with several stakeholders operating with different objectives and scope of actions. In this context, City Logistics (CL) projects aim at optimizing urban logistics activities by reducing the related social and environmental impacts, but are often discarded due to divergent objectives between the stakeholders or lack of economic feasibility. Current inefficiencies and the barriers to the implementation of innovative projects are both due to the distributed decision-making by heterogeneous stakeholders. Agent-based modelling (ABM) enables to approach the problem of distributed decision-making by modelling each of the stakeholders of the urban environment as an autonomous agent. Moreover, integrating ABM with System Dynamics (SD) can prove to be beneficial for reducing the complexity of the model. Therefore, the objective of this research is to develop an integrated agent based/system dynamics simulation model to assess the impacts of CL projects on the stakeholders' activities in order to evaluate their long- term sustainability. Each agent takes decision based on the benefits offered by the project and its utility function, designed with the features that compose each agent's business model. Decision-making processes are also affected by feedback loops, which are modelled via System dynamics (SD). SD is in fact the proper tool to simulate these processes at the agent leve