Applying systems thinking to city logistics: A qualitative (and quantitative) approach to model interdependencies of decisions by various stakeholders and their impact on city logistics

Concepts for city logistics require the cooperation between several types of stakeholders. As different stakeholder types have different objectives and different decision spaces, we suggest a top-level qualitative approach (system thinking) to model the interdependencies of the different factors which are influenced by these stakeholder decisions. We also suggest using this qualitative system thinking model as a meta-structure for further quantitative sub-models (as e.g. system dynamics models). We present a methodological approach to create such a meta-structure (i.e. a system thinking model) and give an example on how this meta-structure can be expanded by quantitative sub-models. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license