Big Data for Operational Efficiency of Transport and Logistics: A Review

In the new information and communication era, digital transformation and adoption of recent technological advances have become a must for all transport and logistics providers who aim to significantly improve their activities. Consequently, this digitalization is inevitably giving birth to voluminous and rapidly growing sets of large-scale data generated from heterogeneous data sources, also known as Big Data. With particular management infrastructures and advanced data analysis methodologies, these huge amounts of data can be efficiently harvested to optimize the logistics and transport operations and provide a higher quality of service. This paper provides a review of the application of Big Data technologies in improving the operational efficiency of transport and logistics, exposes the main use cases and identifies some future research challenges.