Exploring the role of drones and UAVs in logistics and supply chain management: a novel text-based literature review

Abstract:

Drones and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have evolved into advanced instruments with diverseapplications within the Logistics and Supply Chain (LSC) sector. Our study uncovers a significantdisparity highlighted through an examination of recent review papers, indicating a deficiency in athorough examination of the applications of drones/UAVs across the entirety of supply chains. Dueto the abundance of publications in this field, a fresh analytical approach is required. Employinga novel text mining approach, qualitative assessments, and temporal trend analysis, we examinea dataset encompassing 5364 papers from Scopus spanning the years 1978 to 2023. By employ-ing the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, we identify ten distinct research topics within thedomain. Our findings suggest four promising future research directions: (1) fostering sustainable SCsthrough innovative drone-based solutions, (2) harnessing emerging technologies to achieve globalscalability within drone-based SCs, (3) exploring the applications of drone-based supply chains inpandemic control efforts, and (4) integrating drone-based logistics with multimodal transportationfor efficient traffic management. These directions provide valuable insights on the integration ofdrone-based transportation within existing and future supply chains, suggesting potential pathwaysfor advancing production and logistics systems research.