Future Logistics: What to Expect, How to Adapt

Abstract

As a result of global societal and economic as well as technological developments logistics and supply chains face unprecedented challenges. Climate change, the need for more sustainable products and processes, major political changes, the advance of internet technology in logistics and cyber-physical production systems pose challenges that require radical solutions, but also present major opportunities. The authors provide a literature review as well as a roadmap on selected issues and argue that logistics has to reinvent itself not only to address these challenges, but also to cope with mass individualization on the one hand while exploiting business applications of artificial intelligence on the other hand. An essential challenge will be to find a compromise between these two developments—in line and in combination with the known triple-bottom line for sustainability. This is presented with an extended analysis on what to do regarding worker qualification and training in logistics in order to cope with these developments.