The impact of emerging technologies on freight transportation in the digital era: trends, themes, and research opportunities
Paper in proceeding, 2019

Purpose
With various challenges in the digital era, stakeholders are expressing growing interests in understanding the impact of the emerging technologies on freight transportation. The purpose of this paper is to fill the existing research gap by exploring the current merging technologies taking place in the logistics industry and analyze their impact on freight transportation.
Design/methodology/approach
Six representative recent articles from academic, industrial, and governmental perspectives are investigated to elect nine emerging technologies, which are then used as keywords to conduct a systematic literature review covering the literature in the past ten years.
Findings
3D Printing, Artificial Intelligence, Automated Robots, Autonomous Vehicles, Big Data Analytics, Blockchain, Drones, Electric Vehicles, and Internet of Things are identified as emerging technologies. The state-of-the-art of the current research and potential future opportunities are then analyzed.
Research limitations/implications
The research could support various stakeholders to better capture the current status of and the future opportunities in freight transportation.
Original/value
The paper fills a gap in the literature on the impacts of emerging technologies on freight transportation.

digital era

emerging technologies

logistics

systematic literature review

freight transportation

Author

Chuanwen Dong

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Service Management and Logistics

Asif Akram

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Design and Human Factors

Dan Andersson

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Service Management and Logistics

Per-Olof Arnäs

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Service Management and Logistics

Gunnar Stefansson

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Service Management and Logistics

Annual NOFOMA Conference Proceedings

62-90

The 31st Annual NOFOMA Conference
Oslo, Norway,

Architecture for EurOpean Logistics Information eXchange (AEOLIX)

European Commission (EC) (EC/H2020/690797), 2016-09-01 -- 2019-08-31.

Areas of Advance

Transport

Subject Categories

Transport Systems and Logistics

Other Engineering and Technologies not elsewhere specified

Interaction Technologies

More information

Latest update

3/2/2022 2