A Systematic Review on Flexibility Enablers in Logistics Survivability

Abstract

The demand uncertainty particularly during the outbreak of COVID-19 and the increasing competition of market have imposed pressures on the logistics industry to embrace the technology innovation. The pandemic caused a huge impact on world economies and communities and many companies were struggling to survive in this changing environment, thus leaving a question to the resilience of industry. In this situation, flexibility plays the key role for the logistics industry to recover from the supply chain crisis and get prepared for future uncertainties. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive insight on the technology innovations which enable the function of flexibility in logistics through a systematic literature analysis of papers from 2017 to 2022. Bibliometric analysis and content analysis are the methods used to analyse the multiple sources from different databases. The main research gaps in this paper is the flexibility enablers available in the logistics field, their implications on the logistics operations in terms of survivability performance are analysed and the challenges for the adoption of these flexibility enablers to the logistics service providers (LSPs) are identified. The identified flexibility enablers are blockchain, automated guided vehicle (AGV), drones, big data, radio frequency identification (RFID), cyber-physical system (CPS), sensors, cloud computing, augmented reality (AR), unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), internet of things (IoT), digital twin, artificial Intelligence (AI) and information and communications technology (ICT). An implication model is set up to show the relationship of these flexibility with the logistics. The barriers to the LSPs to adopt the flexibility enablers are categorised into economic barriers, managerial barriers and operational barriers. Overall, these could provide some suggestions to the LSPs when they are considering the technological transformation and assist technology developers in identifying commercial opportunities.