Exploring the role of drones and UAVs in logistics and supply chain management: a novel text-based literature review

Abstract

Drones and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have evolved into advanced instruments with diverse applications within the Logistics and Supply Chain (LSC) sector. Our study uncovers a significant disparity highlighted through an examination of recent review papers, indicating a deficiency in a thorough examination of the applications of drones/UAVs across the entirety of supply chains. Due to the abundance of publications in this field, a fresh analytical approach is required. Employing a novel text mining approach, qualitative assessments, and temporal trend analysis, we examine a dataset encompassing 5364 papers from Scopus spanning the years 1978 to 2023. By employing the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, we identify ten distinct research topics within the domain. Our findings suggest four promising future research directions: (1) fostering sustainable SCs through innovative drone-based solutions, (2) harnessing emerging technologies to achieve global scalability within drone-based SCs, (3) exploring the applications of drone-based supply chains in pandemic control efforts, and (4) integrating drone-based logistics with multimodal transportation for efficient traffic management. These directions provide valuable insights on the integration of drone-based transportation within existing and future supply chains, suggesting potential pathways for advancing production and logistics systems research.