Big data for transport and logistics: A review

To face the worldwide competition and meet the recent requirements in the new information technologies era, digitalization and adoption of new information techniques have become a must for all transport and logistics companies and organizations to improve their activities. This digital transformation of transport and logistics sectors is giving birth to huge and increasingly growing sets of voluminous data with high velocity and varied data sources, also known as Big Data. With new manipulation and management infrastructures, as well as more real-time analysis and techniques, these enormous datasets can be efficiently harvested to carry out valuable operational improvements and create new business values in the transport and logistics domains. This paper provides a review of the Big Data in the transport and logistic fields, discusses the current research challenges and identifies some of the promising directions for future research.