Hyperconnected Critical-Product Supply and Distribution System: Towards Autonomous Operations

Abstract

Critical products are essential for sustaining the well-being of people and ensuring the continuity of critical society-serving operations. In the event of a disruption, the supply chains for these products are the most affected, often exhibiting huge demand surges coupled with high workforce and supply scarcity and uncertainty. In the first part of the paper, we present the synthesis of our action research at Georgia Tech during the COVID-19 pandemic on the design, implementation, operation, and continuous improvement of an innovative system for enabling the efficient, seamless, and resilient supply and distribution of personal protection equipment. Featuring a distributed network of software agents capable of autonomous prediction and decision, and incepted with human-centric operations, our system notably served researchers on campus throughout the pandemic with no stockout instances and negligible urgent requests from users. In the second part of the paper, we build on this action research to propose an end-to-end systemic approach for the distribution of critical supplies combining autonomous operations and hyperconnectivity in line with Physical Internet (PI, π) concepts. We notably combine the usage of smart, eco-friendly, and modular containers to protect critical products and ease handling; vision sensors and smart dispensers to monitor and control consumption; and autonomous technologies such as drones, droids, robots, and smart lockers to enable efficient touchless distribution. We explore the impact of operational autonomy on the supply chain, discuss the wide applicability of our system, provide conclusions, and suggest avenues for further research and scalability.