C HAPTER 3
4. Literature Reviews of Supply Chain 0 based on IoT
The potential use of IoT technology across the supply chain is huge. The IoT enabled supply chain can be visualized as a smart interconnected network that binds together many levels of suppliers, manufacturers, service providers, distributors, and customers physically located across different areas of the world.
In this section, we categorized literature reviews of IoT and SC, and present several summary statistics into five categories based on sources, publications type, published place, journals and conferences type, application fields, and authors. As part of the expansive concept of Industry 4.0, “Supply Chain 4.0” is called a new paradigm by numerous authors and experts. In this review, these keywords are “Internet of Thing”, “IoT”, and “Supply Chain”, respectively. The search was performed in the Scopus Database on 10 November 2018. It was possible to download the “title”, “key-words”, and
“abstract” from all the 806 documents, including article, conference paper, book chapter, etc., between 2007–2018 years.
The reviewed literature included journal articles, conference papers, and edited volumes.
4.1 Literature Review over time
The distribution of papers based on publication year is presented with respect to the years in Figure 7 from 2007 to 2018, the number of relevant publications gradually increased, except for the year 2015. This analysis indicates that while the research area is still in the stage of development, the concern of this research has progressively grown in recent years. In the following sections, all articles are summarized and reviewed based on various criteria including; literature sources, publication type, geographic location, journals and conference type, application fields, and most cited authors.
42 Logistics 4.0: Digital Transformation of Supply Chain Management
Table 1: Contributions and applications of the IoT to Supply Chain 4.0.
Field Applications
Manufacturing With the IoT, real-time Material Requirements Planning is done by obtaining real-time information from the operator, pallet, material, machine, etc., in the manufacturing process. Since the material order time is known, the procurement period can also be estimated from the supplier.
Production lines are synchronized by sending information to each other, failures, delays, and errors are minimized in the production process. Reduction of waste, loss, and scrap is aimed.
Multiple and different kinds of products can be produced at the same time with manufacturing line systems that are able to exchange information with the other components; thus customer satisfaction will be increased (Shariatzadeh et al. 2016).
Vehicle tracking With the information collected by sensors, GPS, and RFID, vehicles can be monitored instantaneously.
In this way, transportation time and transportation routes are optimized. With Google Maps and API smartphone, the image of the car and its location will be visually recorded by logistics providers (Lee et al. 2009).
Warehouse
Management The quantity and amount of raw materials remaining in the warehouse are monitored instantaneously, and the movement of the objects can be monitored easily. In this way, the quantity of the remaining product, the number of products ordered, the number of products and materials needed can be obtained in an up-to-date and swift manner.
Smart heat and lighting systems are added to the warehouse to save energy and expenses.
The speed of the forklift used in product transport in the warehouse can be controlled with sensors, and the risk of accidents can be minimized.
With intelligent conveyor and separating systems, products and materials can be easily separated, and components are placed in the places where they belong more easily and in a shorter time (Lee 2015).
Risk
Management Tracking of products carried throughout the Supply Chain is done with embedded RFID and sensors.
With the signals coming from these devices, it is easy to know at which stage and where the product is.
This will reduce the loss of value of the products that are perishable and have a short lifetime. The risk share from deterioration will be minimized, and the risk cost will be minimized (Lee 2015).
Reverse Logistics
Activities By managing all the data about the product lifecycle, many uncertainties in logistics activities are eliminated. Thanks to RFID, sensors, and similar devices, it will be possible to determine which recycling stage (repair, disassembly, waste, etc.) the expired product should be exposed to. In this way, most of the uncertainties in reverse logistics activities will be eliminated, and the logistics cost will be minimized (Gu and Liu 2013).
Informatics It prevents the loss of information by providing all kinds of information about the products that move through the Supply Chain processes and by making it possible for the products to be stored and shared by the Supply Chain elements. As the information obtained is up to date, the bullwhip effect in the Supply Chain is decreased.
Fleet
Management Trucks and containers can be monitored with sensors. Thanks to effective fleet management and sensors, it is an important factor in increasing profitability by providing substantial fuel savings (Sadıkzade 2016).
Environmental
Awareness With the IoT, the carbon footprint of the products is easily recorded. This allows access to the commercial history record of the carbon loan that provides compliance with environmental regulations.
This is an important step in terms of Green Supply Chain (GSC) (Gu and Liu 2013).
Fig. 7: Published papers between 2007–2018 from Scopus database.
4.2 Contribution to the Literature from Various Sources
This review will help us determine the significant concern of research areas where gaps are obvious. As shown in Figure 8, much of the work being done on the IoT and SC is widespread among conference papers (50.5%). Most of these papers were presented at technical and engineering conferences that were abstracted by the IEEE Xplore Library. Such papers are much more commonplace and encouraged in engineering than they are in other fields. Many of the articles are published in information and computer fields. These papers were reviewed and presented the most common sources that are represented in Figure 9. The most contributed sources are Applied Mechanical and Materials, Advanced Materials Research, Communications in Computer and Information Science. After an in-depth analysis of the case articles, the studies carried out in the field area of SC is present in Figure 9, in which the most studied subjects are “RFID” and “SC and supply chain operations”, and the least studied subjects are production, cold SC, and inbound SC activities.
Fig. 8: Review literature by publication type.
Fig. 9: Papers per year by sources.
4.3 Distribution of Papers by Geography
Investigation of the geographic location for academic research containing IoT and SC is presented in Figure 10. According to this study, the vast majority of the IoT and SC focused articles and conference papers are held in China, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Although the Industry 4.0 concepts emerged for the first time in Germany, many studies on this field have been published mostly in China. Most papers are published in Far East Asia and Europe, with very limited representation in South America, the Middle East region and Africa.
44 Logistics 4.0: Digital Transformation of Supply Chain Management
Fig. 10: Country ranking based on publication numbers.
4.4 Distribution of Paper by Approaches and Application Fields
This corresponds to the disproportionate representation of engineering conferences and journals that are currently developing the IoT literature. Based on datasets, we classified articles into sixteen approaches and application fields, which are the most published fields presented in Figure 11. The most popular fields are computer sciences, engineering, business management and accounting, mathematics, decision sciences, social sciences, physics, and astronomy.
Fig. 11: Distribution of papers with the highest contributions in publishing IoT and logistics topics.
4.5 Citation Report of Authors
One of the most important criteria of the research is the impact of the paper on other scientific environments. The author’s analysis can be a good measure to evaluate the impacts of the publications. Figure 12 represents the most contributing authors in the fields. According to results, Li Rang Zheng, George Huang is the most productive authors in this field.
Zheng reviewed the highest number of papers according to other literature reviews. Zheng and Han cooporate together, and they work on the food supply chain, agriculture, IoT. George Q. Huang focuses on IoT, Big data, decision making, and production Supply Chain system; Yang’s studies are related to IoT, RFID, and agriculture supply chain.
Fig. 12: Document counts for top authors.