Guest Editorial: Special Section on Emerging Advances in Logistics Systems: Integrating Remote Sensing, IT, and Autonomy

The logistics systems that sustain today’s global supply chains and transportation systems must provide resource-efficient, sustainable, safe, equitable, and timely delivery of goods and services for the benefit of the economy and society. The increasing availability of fast, cheap sensing technologies that can capture real-time data on the location of items and the states of the systems in which they are operating, as well as the rapid and often unpredictable changes in environmental and market conditions, provides opportunities for innovative arbitrage of information, speed, and flexibility. Automation Science and Engineering (ASE) has the potential to enhance the performance of logistics systems by providing novel, integrated hardware, and software solutions that alter the economics of different segments of the logistics chain, by improving throughput and reducing resource requirements and environmental impact. At the same time, the development of novel technologies, such as regenerative medicine and renewable energy are placing totally new demands on logistics systems, requiring the movement of living section in the former case and energy in the latter. The increasingly complex networks of service providers and supply chain partners that logistics systems must serve create complex systems of systems where the decisions of any individual agent may have significant unforeseen consequences for the larger network, requiring a broader perspective on these sections than that of individual stages in the logistics network.