Applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) in Smart Logistics: A Comprehensive Survey

TLDR

Logistics drives national and firm competitiveness but remains costly and inefficient, and the rise of smart logistics—enabled by IoT’s data‑rich, analytical capabilities—offers a path to improved performance. This survey reviews literature on IoT applications in smart logistics. The authors survey existing work by first outlining smart logistics fundamentals, then detailing IoT enabling technologies, reviewing their deployment across transportation, warehousing, loading/unloading, carrying, distribution processing, distribution, and information processing, and concluding with challenges and future research directions.

Abstract

Logistics is a driver of countries' and firms' competitiveness and plays a vital role in economic growth. However, the current logistics industry still faces high costs and low efficiency. The development of smart logistics brings opportunities to solve these problems. As one of the important technologies of the modern information and communication technology (ICT), the Internet of Things (IoT) can create oceans of data and explore the complex relationships between the transactions represented by these data with the help of various mathematical analysis technologies. These features are helpful to promote the development of smart logistics. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey on the literature involving IoT technologies applied to smart logistics. First, the related work and background knowledge of smart logistics are introduced. Then, we highlight the enabling technologies for IoT in smart logistics. Furthermore, we review how IoT technologies are applied in the realm of smart logistics from the perspectives of logistics transportation, warehousing, loading/unloading, carrying, distribution processing, distribution, and information processing. Finally, some challenges and future directions are discussed.