A systematic literature review of innovative technologies adopted in logistics management

Many innovative technologies have been successfully adopted in logistics and supply chain management processes to increase efficiency, reduce costs or enhance communication. In recent years, considerable attention from both practitioners and academics has been focused on evaluating the impacts of innovative technologies adoption. However, the current body of literature on technology adoption, implementation and evaluation in logistics is quite fragmented; thus, an updated and structured overview of the scientific literature in this field might be useful. To this end, this work presents a systematic literature review (SLR) that aims to increase the understanding of the trend toward new technologies in logistics and identify the main research trends and gaps. The principal research trends that emerged from the SLR involve the technologies, their evolution over time and their relationships with the research methodologies. The main literature gaps concern integration and communication, technology-adoption processes and differences between inbound and outbound logistics.