Green Logistics for Heavy Equipment: a bibliometric analysis

In recent years, the concept of sustainability has become increasingly important, driven by a greater awareness of the economic, environmental, and social context. At the same time, the design of efficient logistics systems has extended the boundaries and relationships between organisations, suppliers, and customers. On one hand, activities related to logistics processes positively stimulate economic development, while on the other hand they negatively impact on the environmental context. From these two principles, the term green logistics was devised with the aim of reducing environmental externalities. Sustainable logistics is widely studied for conventional and consumer products, but less diffused for large industrial assets and equipment. These products are mostly of an Engineer To Order (ETO) nature and require ad hoc logistics. In this paper, a bibliometric analysis is described, conducted to highlight using quantitative analysis the most important issues, trends, and challenges in the field of sustainable logistics and its management for large-scale and heavy products. Specifically, search results of heavy equipment logistics and sustainable heavy equipment logistics are compared using classification tool. It emerged that logistics sustainability for heavy equipment is not widespread and that emerging topic such as machine learning algorithms and Industry 4.0 technologies can be opportunities for sustainable development. The results of this research may be of interest to logistics managers, logistics providers, and researchers for the identification of literature gaps and innovative opportunities