Abstract
Nowadays, the market competition becomes increasingly fierce due to diversified customer needs, stringent environmental requirements, and global competitors. One of the most important factors for companies to not only survive but also thrive in today’s competitive market is their logistics performance. This paper aims, through a systematic literature analysis of 115 papers from 2012 to 2020, at presenting quantitative insights and comprehensive overviews of the current and future research landscapes of sustainable logistics in the Industry 4.0 era. The results show that Industry 4.0 technologies provide opportunities for improving the economic efficiency, environmental performance, and social impact of logistics sectors. However, several challenges arise with this technological transformation, i.e., trade-offs among different sustainability indicators, unclear benefits, lifecycle environmental impact, inequity issues, and technology maturity. Thus, to better tackle the current research gaps, future suggestions are given to focus on the balance among different sustainability indicators through the entire lifecycle, human-centric technological transformation, system integration and digital twin, semi-autonomous transportation solutions, smart reverse logistics, and so forth.
Highlights
With the increasing concerns on environmental pollution, resource depletion, and climate change from the whole society, enterprises must transform their businesses and operations into more sustainable ways (Rauter et al 2017)
The literature search was conducted in November 2020, and two main sets of keywords related to sustainable logistics and Industry 4.0 were used
Investigation of the titles and abstracts: First, we investigated the type of paper in the filtered sample, 8 bibliometric analysis papers; editorial and review articles were excluded
Summary
With the increasing concerns on environmental pollution, resource depletion, and climate change from the whole society, enterprises must transform their businesses and operations into more sustainable ways (Rauter et al 2017). As shown, this paper aims at filling the literature gap by conducting a systematic literature review to illustrate the current and future research landscapes of sustainable logistics in the Industry 4.0 era. Using both bibliometric analysis and content analysis, we thoroughly explore the current research landscape that links sustainable logistics practices with various Industry 4.0 technologies. We analyze both opportunities and challenges of adopting Industry 4.0 technologies in logistics sectors related to economic, environmental, and social sustainability. This paper links two concepts: sustainable logistics and Industry 4.0, and their interactions in literature are focused on Concerning these concepts, the following three research questions are proposed to understand the state of knowledge of adopting Industry 4.0 technologies in sustainable logistics:.
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