Toward Smart Logistics: Engineering Insights and Emerging Trends

Each day, companies and organizations are facing new challenges. The customer requirements are increasing and global competition is leading to important changes in the industrial world. Against this background, the fourth industrial revolution aims to deal with these challenges. Besides the lack of comparable studies covering the new concepts in logistics, this study intends to study, and clarify diverse approaches in smart logistics frameworks in order to produce a new picture of the state of smart logistics research. The main objective of this paper is to present a coherent and comprehensive vision of current efforts in smart logistics. In particular, we begin by presenting the methodology followed and the bibliometric analysis. We also propose a classification of existing works in the literature dealing with intelligent logistics. Also, we provide an overview of smart logistics technologies and applications presented in the recent literature and provide a summary of related research work. Finally, we identify possible future areas of research.