In this position paper, we present our vision on the future of the logistics business domain and the use of information technology (IT) in this domain. The vision is based on extensive experience with Dutch and European logistics in various contexts and from various perspectives. We expect that the vision also holds for logistics outside Europe. We build our vision in a number of steps. First, we make an inventory of the most important trends in the logistics domain - we call these mega-trends. Next, we do the same for the information technology domain, restricted to technologies that have relevance for logistics. Then, we introduce logistics meta-concepts that we use to describe our vision and relate them to business engineering. We use these three ingredients to analyze leading concepts that we currently observe in the logistics domain. Next, we consolidate all elements into a model that represents our vision of the integrated future of logistics and IT. We elaborate on the role of data platforms and open standards in this integrated vision.
In this position paper, we share our vision on the future of the logistics business domain and the use of information technology (IT) in this domain. The vision is based on extensive experience with Dutch and European logistics in various contexts and from various perspectives. We expect that the vision also holds for logistics outside Europe.
We build our vision in a number of steps. First, we make an inventory of what we think are the most important trends in the logistics domain -we call these mega-trends. Next, we do the same for the information technology domain, restricted to technologies that have relevance for logistics. Then, we introduce a few logistics meta-concepts that we use to describe our vision and relate them to business engineering. We use these three ingredients to analyze leading concepts that we currently observe in the logistics domain. Next, we consolidate all elements into a model that represents our vision of the integrated future of logistics and IT. We elaborate on the role of data platforms and open standards in this integrated vision. This position paper is complemented by an overview report of projects on ICT in transport and logistics [Dijk17]. This report presents a detailed overview of European international projects and Dutch national projects that address the use of ICT in transport in logistics, making use of the framework developed in this position paper.
We observe three main logistics mega-trends that are currently developing in a more explicit or more implicit way.
Firstly, we see a strong need arising for separation of thinking about strategic physical infrastructures and operational business processes. Strategic physical infrastructures for logistics cover both static infrastructures such as roads, waterways and docks, and mobile infrastructures such as trains, trucks and ships. These infrastructures are set up with a long-term deployment objective -typically in the order of one or more decades. Operational business processes in logistics are defined in the context of current business models. Given swiftly changing economic and business contexts, these business models and hence the business processes have a relatively short life span -typically in the order of one or several years, with a decreasing trend. Consequently, designing infrastructures and the processes that use them in one go leads major problems: they have significantly different life cycles.
Secondly, we see a development towards industrialization and professionalization in logistics. Traditionally, logistics is a domain where many management decisions are taken in an ad-hoc fashion, building strongly on (personal) insight and experience of those involved. Structured modeling and tooling is used, but often in a fragmented and hardly prescriptive fashion. The growing complexity of logistics processes and their supporting infrastructures makes this an increasingly undesirable situation. Consequently, an industrialization of logistics processes and professionalization of decision makers is required, not unlike the development that we have seen in large-scale manufacturing.
Thirdly, we observe a development towards logistics applications that support new economic paradigms, such as local production economies (based for instance on additive manufacturing [Gibs15] and smart factories [GTI14]), cyclical sustainable economies (based on concepts like cradle-to-cradle product engineering [Brau02]), and outcome economies [Acce15] (based on explicitly measured business outcomes for customers). These new paradigms require substantially different logistical handling than traditional economic paradigms, such as traditional centralized mass-production. Major differences appear in local customization, increased flexibility and faster evolution of logistics processes.
These mega-trends lead to new playing fields with new business possibilities and new players. These new playing fields may emerge in unexpected ways, causing disruptions in the logistics domain. Also, new forms of collaborations between stakeholders in logistics markets may arise, leading to multi-sided business models. In Section 5, we show how the discussed logistics mega-trends can be mapped to contemporary logistics innovations.
We observe a number of mega-trends in the information technology domain related to applications in logistics. We categorize them into seven categories:
- Sensing: the development of technologies to observe events in the physical logistics world in a multi-modal way and to record these events into digital format; The above seven mega-trends contribute to the development of a spectrum of IT for logistics. As these mega-trends are related to applications in logistics, we can place these megatrends in a logistics data processing cycle as shown in Figure 1:
Logistics data is obtained in real-time fashion through sensing, e.g. when RFIDequipped materials pass by scanners.
Sensed data is stored, either on-site at a comp
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