Physical Internet: Literature review and research opportunities

Abstract

With an increasingly rich and personalized product offering, the digitalization of the commercial relationship and the opening of world borders, commercial transactions have never been this important. And so are the requirements in terms of time and availability that logistics and supply chains should fulfill. These latters still support the growth of the economic exchanges but struggle to find a disruptive model capable of meeting more requirements with sustainable economic, environmental and social approaches. Several initiatives are under consideration, including the Physical Internet, which offers an abstract, generic and global framework for managing the logistics chain of physical objects. In this article, we review the literature of the Physical Internet following the qualitative content analysis method. We found that although the number of contributions is limited, the contribution grows at a rate of 25% every year on average. We analyzed the contributions after categorizing them to find that the governance (management and community) of the Physical Internet from a global perspective is not covered enough by the current literature which can be an opportunity for future research.