Background
Logistics deals with physical movements of products/materials and relevant information flows in the entire supply chain process. Due to global challenges on climate change and pollution, hunger and poverty, health and well-being, companies are under great pressure to transform their logistics activities to be socially, economically and environmentally sustainable. For environmental sustainability, logistics operators focus on lowering the ecological footprint and energy consumption by adopting the concept of green logistics in various areas from strategic designs to operational management (eg. Dekker, Bloemhof and Mallidis, 2012). Reverse logistics and closed-loop supply chain have also gained traction recently to minimize the environmental impact of waste management and reduce the use of natural resources. For social sustainability, factors such as job creation, working environment, and employee satisfaction have been considered when developing logistics systems. Finally, economic sustainability in logistics focuses on improving operational efficiency, reducing lead time, and cutting costs. The optimization of the sustainable logistics operations is largely dependent on the capability to balance the trade-off between the three dimensions of sustainability.
Logistics 4.0 is the new paradigm that enables smart logistics systems by adopting digital technologies in the fourth industrial evolution, so-called Industry 4.0 (Winkelhaus and Grosse, 2020). Industry 4.0 integrates the cyber world with physical world by using various disruptive technologies such as cyber-physical systems (CPS), internet of things (IoT), cloud technologies, big data analytics (BDA), blockchain, digital twin, robotics, augmented reality, or 3D printing. Focusing on smart products, automated systems and digitalization, Industry 4.0 provides firms with unprecedented opportunities to sharpen the sustainability goals in industrial and operations engineering (Tseng et al., 2021).
Logistics has been at the forefront of the Industry 4.0 technology adoption to generate more informed decisions for better economic and operational performances in various problems such as routing, resource allocation, warehousing, preservation, and last mile delivery (Nguyen et al., 2018, Nguyen et al., 2022). However, the use of those cutting-edge technologies to develop sustainable logistics systems, which also considers environmental and social sustainability, is still largely understudied.
Scope of the Special Issue
The proposed special issue thus aims to bring together research works from both academia and practitioners to explore how Industry 4.0 technologies can help support the development of sustainable logistics across industries. This call encourages all types of empirical work from both qualitative and quantitative approach such as cases studies, surveys, panel data, experiments, action research, data-driven or analytical modelling with significant contributions that advance the knowledge and application of sustainability in Logistics 4.0. Literature review articles in the relevant topics are also welcome.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- The adoption and development of Logistics 4.0 practices to achieve sustainable goals.
- Strategic design of smart logistics to achieve sustainable goals with disruptive technology.
- Sustainable strategies and operation mechanism design of digital logistics.
- Applications of smart sustainable logistics in reverse logistics and closed-loop supply chain.
- Sustainable logistics strategies and operations in smart cities.
