Reality of autonomous transportation technologies in global supply chains : the consumer driven demand chain

Autonomous transportation has been implemented in supply chain for decades, especially in indoor environments, such as warehouses, where safety risks and regulations are less than in everyday traffic. Applications include horizontal and vertical transportation. Regarding outdoor transportation, the most used and researched application is platooning, which consists of a convoy of vehicles, where the first vehicle leads and the others copy its movements. However, full automation in this environment has not been completely achieved within this aspect. The paper aims to examine the important principles of autonomous vehicles, its applications, and the extent to which it impacts the transportation industry and global supply chains. Autonomous vehicles can perform driving functions by themselves, by sensing its environment and navigating with or without human input. The main autonomous functions can be divided in navigation, situational analysis, motion planning, and trajectory control. The benefits of this technology are improved safety, higher efficiency, lower environmental impacts and greater comfort, whereas barriers include laws and liabilities, high initial costs, ethics, human factors and security risks. The most important impact of autonomous transportation in supply chains is costs reductions, mainly due to staff reductions, fuel efficiency gains, accident savings and productivity gains. Through our research study, we examine the advantages of autonomous vehicles and how enterprises need to redefine their supply chains for ways to benefit from these new technologies and achieve competitive advantage in global demand driven markets