A Reference Framework for the Performance-Based Decision Support of City Authorities in Urban Freight Transport

Urban freight transport is one major contributor to the existing externalities of urban transport (e.g., congestion, pollutant emissions). While the extent of these externalities is often the result of decentral and extra-urban decision-making processes of involved actors (e.g., tour planning and routing of fleet operators), the responsibility to implement corrective as well as preventive measures is typically centralized in the hands of the city authorities. In conformity with their key functions, the authorities have to meet, the often oppositely aligned, societal expectations, business needs as well as existing political objectives. Amplified by this constellation, selecting effective measures with positive cost-benefit relations for the society from an existing plethora of measures leads to complex decision scenarios and embodies a particularly challenging endeavor. In order to supplement existing approaches to support the decision-making of city authorities in urban freight transport (e.g., modeling and simulation; stakeholder involvement procedures), performance-based procedures from the domain of information management embody promising approaches. As one fundamental step towards their realization, this paper presents a reference framework to define the system boundaries, to relate the involved system components, and to establish a consistent perspective as well as a uniform understanding for scholars and practitioners. In this context, the framework development process is presented along with a pre-defined set of requirements.