Analytic Hierarchy Process for City Hub Location Selection - The Viennese Case

Growing urbanization and rising urban freight volumes contribute to increasing congestion, noise and pollution which negatively impact a city’s population. City hubs are one means of mitigating this problem by consolidating goods of different suppliers at the hub and cooperating in the last mile delivery. Because of the general shortage of urban space, a major challenge is finding an appropriate location for such a hub. This paper provides a decision support tool based on the analytic hierarchy process for the hub location selection problem, which considers quantitative and qualitative criteria. By involving three stakeholder groups – the municipality, logistics companies and citizens – the approach insures a comprehensive view. The application of the model is tested for the location selection of a midi-hub – a medium-sized city hub – in Vienna. Hence, our results show that a good compromise between different stakeholder views regarding a mid-hub location selection problem can be achieved by the application of our AHP-based decision support tool.