Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 3937: Using the FAHP, ISM, and MICMAC Approaches to Study the Sustainability Influencing Factors of the Last Mile Delivery of Rural E-Commerce Logistics (Sustainability)

The development of rural e-commerce has rapidly driven the development of rural logistics in China. Improving the service quality of the last mile delivery is an important measure to promote the sustainable development of rural e-commerce logistics. However, such work is challenging because the current rural last mile delivery is inefficient and unsustainable and is influenced by a set of interacting factors. It is necessary to explore the relationships among the sustainability influencing factors of rural last mile delivery. A total of 15 sustainability influencing factors are selected. The improved fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) is used to assign the weights of the factors and then the interpretative structural model (ISM) is used to determine the hierarchical structure of each factor. The driving force-dependency quadrant graph is constructed by cross-impact matrix multiplication (MICMAC). The research results show that four factors, including “convenience of returning goods”, “integrity of goods”, “advance reservation of goods pickup”, and “delivery costs”, are the most basic factors affecting the sustainability of rural last mile delivery and are the deepest and most indispensable factors. This research provides valuable information for decision makers to develop proactive strategies and reinforcement policies to improve the service quality of rural last mile delivery, which could promote the sustainable development of rural logistics.