Operational Research for Technology-Driven Supply Chains in the Industry 4.0 Era: Recent Development and Future Studies

Abstract

Today, supply chain operations have entered the Industry 4.0 era. Technologies, such as blockchain, big-data, artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing and cloud-computing, are all hot topics. Motivated by their importance, in this paper, we conduct a review of the closely related literature in the well-established mainstream operational research (OR) journals. From our research, we first examine the OR literature on Industry 4.0 related studies. Then we classify the technology-operations-related literature into three major categories, namely, information technologies for supply chain operations, technologies for sustainable operations, and technologies for production operations. Various less popular areas on technology-driven operations in supply chains, namely, technology licensing and outsourcing (TLO), online data, and risk, finance and security (RFS), are also examined. From the reviews, we identify the major research gaps. After that, we establish a future research agenda. We believed that this paper lays the foundation for further OR studies on technology-driven supply chain management in the Industry 4.0 era.