Institute of Transportation, MOTC

        As technological advancements surge in recent years, the concept of Internet of Things has emerged in the society in the past decade. Internet of Things’ (IoT) related technologies and services have become more familiar to people, thus analysis and future forecasting on IoT is vital and beneficial to guide both scholars and practitioners. Many IoT technologies have been applied in the logistics industry in recent years and they performed substantial impact in many sectors such as shipping, air freight, warehousing and inventory etc.
       Exploring technology opportunities and carrying out technological forecasting is essential for IoT‘s rapid changes and there are manifold of techniques or methods to do so. Herein, data and text mining techniques, technology opportunity analysis and technology-service evolution analysis have been applied for analysis and observing IoT technologies and services evolutions. Academic journals, market reports and patents have been reviewed on the topic of IoT in logistics field; collecting academic-based and market-based documents supports the provision of a comprehensive overview of this study. Moreover, technology opportunities have been analyzed to explore IoT-based logistics services, for example with the use of cloud technology to develop smart logistics services, or with the RFID technology to develop information logistics services. Lastly, it enables the observation of IoT technology and service evolutions by combining initial structured data with unstructured and semi-structured data from all documents. In summary, results of this study will provide methodological guidelines on this topic for a comprehensive understanding; aiming to increase productivity as a whole and coming up with a standardized business model for timely use.