Towards building an understanding of electrification of logistics systems – A literature review and a research agenda

Abstract

While electrification of freight deliveries has the potential to heavily reduce the sector’s negative impact, there is a clear lack of understanding how logistics systems are affected when electric freight vehicles are implemented. The purpose of the paper is to present an overview of the area and identify major gaps in the literature. A systematic literature review was conducted, with an initial sample of 353 papers, finally resulting in 62 papers after several exclusion steps. A descriptive analysis showed that the area is growing fast and that a vast majority of the papers applied mathematical methods with transport data. Further, five categories were deemed of interest in relation to logistics and electrification in the analysed literature: transport operation, charging, cost, actors, and sustainability. Each category is elaborated on and described in the paper. Additionally, the discussion includes several research gaps that the paper proposes need to be addressed to achieve viable electrified logistics systems and the gaps resulted in a research agenda with seven bullet points aiming to guide future research. The research agenda include, how planning of logistics systems is affected when charging is included; how logistics performance is affected when adopting electric trucks, and there is a need to include actors and their perspectives to a larger extent than what is done in the current literature. By highlighting what is missing in the literature, this paper strives to be an important addition to achieve viable electrified logistics systems, which can ultimately lead to a reduction of the freight sector’s negative climate impact.