The logistics and transportation sectors play a vital role in modern economies, representing countries competitiveness enhancement opportunities and, in the meantime, imposing significant social and environmental challenges. In 2015, logistics and transportation costs accounted to 7.85% and 9-10% of United States and European Union GDPs, respectively. In the same year, these industries contributed for the 5.5% to global GHG emissions. These results derive as from new market trends and requirements emergence (e.g., urbanization, e-commerce, etc.) as from logistics and transportation systems \complex" nature (e.g., multiple actors with different goals, uncertainty, etc.).
To face the mentioned issues, reorganisations of current logistics and transportation systems have still to be studied, planned, tested and evaluated. In recent years, the “City Logistics" and the “Physical Internet" theoretical frameworks, focusing on urban and inter-urban environments respectively, have been gaining momentum between researchers and practitioners. Nevertheless, real implementations of such paradigms are still far to be deployed: indeed, innovative collaborative logistics business and organisational models as well as technological enablers supporting a successful execution of logistics and transport activities are still missing. With these premises, the general goal of this work is to contribute to the understanding of collaborative logistics, focusing on emerging business and organizational models such as the Physical Internet. To this aim, the present research addresses three major aspects. First, the problem is tackled from a conceptual point of view: indeed, since the current collaborative logistics types classification (i.e., the “classic" vertical, horizontal and diagonal ones) is missing a concept to emphasise the emergence of “innovative" models characterized by a simultaneous application of multiple classical approaches, a new collaborative logistics type called “interconnected" is coined. Second, in order to fill the scientific literature gap represented by the absence of a harmonised methodology to analyse collaborative logistics management implications, a taxonomy for scientific contributions classification and future research areas identification is proposed. Finally, starting from the results of the theoretical analysis, a practical application is derived. In particular, the ICT and decision technologies innovation gaps is addressed by presenting a general procedure for cloud-based collaborative logistics platforms design, deployment and preliminary performance evaluation.
