Over the years, with the migration of organizations towards the concepts of logistics 4.0, a paradigm shift was necessary to guarantee logistics efficiency. The challenge is to dynamically cope in real time with vast number of shipments and destinations, which need to be realigned both with a determined lead time and with a finite of available resources. Although a number of standards have already been adopted for the management of transport and logistics operations, taking advantage, for instance, of Decision Support Systems and Geographic Information Systems, new models are required for achieving effective handling of the dynamic logistics environment that is shaped today. In this paper, an integrated logistics framework addressing the previous challenges is presented, for the first time, as a result of the activities of the H2020 COG-LO project. This novel approach exploits Social Internet of Things (SIoT) and the digital twins technique to realize the concept of the Cognitive Logistics Object (CLO). A CLO is defined as an entity that is augmented with cognitive capabilities, it is autonomous, and bears social-like capabilities, which enable the formulation of ad hoc communities for negotiating optimal solutions in logistics operations.

According to the defined challenge of cross-border delivery, a pilot experiment based on the integration of new digital technologies to assess process optimization potential in the postal sector was designed. The specifics were investigated with events processing based on digital representation. Different events were simulated with scenario analysis with the integration of the Cognitive Advisor and supported by the monitoring of KPIs. The business environment is forcing logistics companies to optimize their delivery processes, integrate new technologies, improve their performance metrics, and move towards Logistics 4.0. Their main goals are to simultaneously reduce costs, environmental impact, delivery times, and route length, as well as to increase customer satisfaction. This pilot experiment demonstrates the integration of new digital technologies for process optimization in real time to manage intraday changes. Postal operators can increase flexibility, introduce new services, improve utilization by up to 50%, and reduce costs and route length by 12.21%. The Cognitive Advisor has shown great potential for the future of logistics by enabling a dynamic approach to managing supply chain disruptions using sophisticated data analytics for process optimization based on the existing delivery infrastructure and improving business processes. Research originality is identified with a novel approach of real-time simulation based on the integration of the Cognitive Advisor in postal delivery.

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