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.

This paper is aimed at identifying the main patterns related to the application of new Digital Supply Chain Technologies that through the Industry 4.0 paradigm, are redefining supply chain organisations. To this end, a set of DSC initiatives has been analysed via an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to understand the influence of several social and economical factors on the implementation of DSC solutions. Results show that the time factor, the Gross Domestic Product per capita, the amount of foreign investment, and the expenditure in Research and Development are significant drivers of DSC technologies. In particular, Big Data are associated with a higher economic effort than Blockchain, although these two technologies, together with Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence, usually characterise most recent implementations. The present work might foster research about the contextual factors affecting the DSC diffusion it could assist both practitioners and policymakers in defining appropriate DSC strategies.

Urban freight distribution accounts for a significant share of pollution and congestion in urban areas. To reduce these negative impacts, municipalities have implemented several City Logistics (CL) measures. This paper presents the empirical analysis of a dataset of 70 European cities that have been piloting or rolling out a CL measure, to provide an updated indication of the status of CL initiatives and analyse the diffusion of CL internationally. The research objective is also to help understand the contextual factors might explain their introduction. To this end, a set of City Logistics Indices (CLI) is used as indicators of the breadth and number of CL measures implemented in a city. A statistical correlation of these CLIs with respect to a set of independent variables, namely the contextual factors, is also performed. Results reveal that the level of pollution, the diffusion of e-commerce and GDP are important drivers of CL deployment

An empirical study is presented to investigate the risk factors affecting the value for money that can be obtained from using the public-private partnership delivery system to develop social facility projects. Based on a model describing the main risks affecting a project, a linear regression analysis is conducted on a data set of privately financed health care projects in the United Kingdom to explore the main factors that might have significant relationships with the annual unitary charge payment. The results reveal that the economic and political environment, the hospital capacity, the construction duration, and the concession period are significant factors of the price paid by the granting authority. The study confirms that the unitary charge is not only affected by investment, operations, and financial life-cycle costs, but also by risk factors and the level of risk allocated to the private sponsors. The proposed methodology might help both public and private parties in improving a private fi...

Purpose: – This study aims at capturing the perspectives of construction professionals into a classified taxonomy of the various characteristics of smart buildings and at developing an index able to define their level of smartness. Design/methodology/approach: – A questionnaire survey has been administrated to construction professionals in the service of designers, constructors and owners. Results have been analyzed with the Kruskal–Wallis test and they have been used to develop a smartness index. Findings: – Designers and owners are more focused on the energy issue than constructors. The energy captures the attention of practitioners with less years of experience, confirming that the awareness of the energy topic is rather recent. Originality/value: – The main characteristics of smart buildings have been structured in domains and subdomains. Their importance has been rated by construction professional and a smartness index for smart building has been developed to provide with a convenient tool for evaluation and benchmarking.