The impact of emerging and disruptive technologies on freight transportation in the digital era: current state and future trends

• Published date: 12 January 2021
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-01-2020-0043
• Pages: 386-412
• Date: 12 January 2021
• Subject Matter: Management science & operations,Logistics
• Author: Chuanwen Dong,Asif Akram,Dan Andersson,Per-Olof Arnäs,Gunnar Stefansson

The impact of emerging and

disruptive technologies on freight

transportation in the digital era:

current state and future trends

Chuanwen Dong

ESCP Europe –Berlin Campus, Berlin, Germany

Asif Akram, Dan Andersson and Per-Olof Arn€

as

Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, and

Gunnar Stefansson

Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden and

School of Engineering and Natural Science, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland

Abstract

Purpose –With various challenges in the digital era, stakeholders are expressing growing interests in

understanding the impact of emerging and disruptive technologies on freight transportation. This paper

provides a systematic literature review of the current state of affairs as well as future trends and aims to

support stakeholders’decision-making in logistics management in the era of disruptive technologies.

Design/methodology/approach –Several recent and representative articles from academic, industrial and

governmental perspectives were investigated to set the scene for this research and to serve as a baseline for

electing nine emerging technologies, which were then used to conduct a systematic literature review covering

the literature within the area during the past twelve years.

Findings –3D printing, artificial intelligence, automated robots, autonomous vehicles, big data analytics,

blockchain, drones, electric vehicles and the Internet of Things were identified as the emerging technologies.

The current state of existing research and potential future opportunities were analyzed.

Research limitations/implications –Since the potential literaturebody is almost impossible to fully cover,

a tradeoff between the number of emerging technologies and the related literature reviewed has been

performed. However, the paper provides a novel approach to select the emerging and disruptive technologies

and a systematic literature review to fill the identified research gap in the related literature.

Practical implications –The research support various stakeholders to better capture the current status of

and the future opportunities in freight transportation and gain a clearer understanding of the disruptive

technologies as well as to guide them in how to deploy these initiatives in future decision-making.

Originality/value –By providing a systematic literature review on the trends, themes and research

opportunities in the era of disruptive technologies, the papers bring about broad and comprehensive review on

the impact of disruptive technologies on logistics and transportation as well as opportunities to support

management decision support in the logistics industry.

Keywords Emerging technologies, Disruptive technologies, Logistics, Freight transportation, Systematic

literature review, Digital era, Decision making

Paper type Literature review

1. Introduction

When the first combustion engines were mounted to replace the horses of a carriage, it might

have been difficult for even the smartest minds to foresee the advancement of modern

IJLM

32,2

386

This paper forms part of a special section “Decision Making in Logistics Management in the Era of

Disruptive Technologies”, guest edited by Vijay Pereira, Gopalakrishnan Narayanamurthy, Alessio

Ishizaka and Noura Yassine.

This paper is based on work done in the project AEOLIX, funded by the European Union’s Horizon

2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 690797.

Received 29 January 2020

Revised 31 July 2020

Accepted 22 December 2020

The International Journal of

Logistics Management

Vol. 32 No. 2, 2021

pp. 386-412

© Emerald Publishing Limited

0957-4093

DOI 10.1108/IJLM-01-2020-0043

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/0957-4093.htm

transportation systems. Since then, technologies have greatly changed the freight and person

movements around us.

The freight logistics industry has experienced revolutionary growth and development in

recent decades (Liao-Troth et al.,2012) and, despite some dip after the economic cutback in 2008,

has increased steadily in recent years (European Commission, 2018), not the least in urban areas

where Internet sales and home deliveries are increasing at an even faster pace (Campbell and Van

Woensel, 2019). At the same time, it has been widely acknowledged that many of the current

logistics systems are not sustainable and attempts to improve operations rely on new

technologies that will definitely increase in the future (Kache and Seuring, 2014;Harris et al., 2015;

Garcia-Alcaraz et al.,2017). The advent of the fourth industrial revolution (Schwab, 2017)

challenges the current logistics industry but, at the same time, provides opportunities to use

disruptive technologies to invent new business models (Evangelista et al., 2018)atthesametime

as it supports current ones. This trend has resulted in increased interest from various

stakeholders to understand the impact of emerging and disruptive technologies on freight

transportation, together with the support of decision-making in logistics management (Petrovi

c

et al., 2018).

Whereas industry and government are intensively discussing the impact of disruptive

technology(e.g. DHL, 2018;TransportationResearch Board, 2016), reviews fromacademia are

lacking.Topics such as sustainable logistics (e.g. Reefke and Sundaram,2017;Roy et al., 2018),

city logistics(e.g. Savelsbergh and Woensel, 2016;Neghabadi et al.,2018),operations research

in logistics (e.g. Dekkeret al.,2012;Grazia Speranza, 2018) and general research methods (e.g.

Craigheadet al.,2007)have been thoroughly reviewedand discussed. However,these attempts

focus on specifictechnologies/applicationareas and do not provide a broad systematic review

of the current state of emerging technologies as a whole. The absence of a broad systematic

review may leadthe research community tocarry out research in silos inthe fast-paced digital

evolution era andhence be unable to provide direction to industry experts and policymakers.

One reason for the lack of a systematic review of technology in transportation maybe the

enormous sizeof the literature body. When the keywords“technology AND transportation”or

“technologyAND logistics”wereused for establisheddatabase search engines,more than three

million articles were found. It is obviously unwise to read all of these articles in a literature

review. Another reason includes the challenge of synergizing the various technologies for an

overarchingview, which makes the researcheven more complex. In this paper,we aim to start

filling this research gap by investigating the following research questions:

(1) What are the major emerging technologies in freight transportation?

(2) How do those technologies impact freight transportation?

By answering these questions, this paper aims to contribute to the literature in three ways.

First, we propose a novel method to identify nine emerging technologies by combining

perspectives from academia, industry and government. Second, we obtain knowledge about

the impact of the identified technologies on freight transportation from literature. Third, we

provide our own analysis by integrating and synergizing this knowledge, thereby outlining

how it supports stakeholders’decision-making in logistics and transport management.

2. The emerging technologies

The justification for using the label “emerging technology”ishighly subjective. Over the years,

a number of articles from various stakeholders have proposed many technologies, and it is

obviously unwise to count and analyze all technologies that have been mentioned in the rich

literature body. This paper proposes selecting six influential “seed articles”representing

academic, industrial and governmental perspectives, reading their nominations, and then

electing (nominated by at least half of the seed articles) the emerging technologies. This

Current state of

affairs

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