Insights and Future Directions

From the above analysis, we can absorb the following insights and future directions in the area of operations research of logistics and supply chain management.

First, the logistics issue regarding the people's livelihood becomes a hot spot. The traditional research in this regard is related to perishable product, fashion product, and electronic product, which have short life cycle. Nowadays, such topics might include city logistics, emergency logistics, and agriculture supply chain.

Second, new directions on logistics and supply chain management can be brought about by the development of economy and technology. A typical example is the information technology which leads to the research on e-business and related distribution channel choice. Nowadays, the common usage of RFID, cloud technique, and big data can be important research directions for future study.

Third, the environmental related research will continue to be big issue. With the steady increase in global population and economic scale, resource crisis, ecological damage, environmental pollution, and other issues have drawn universal concern. It has been the consensus of the international community to attain socioeconomic sustainable development through a greener economic pattern and lifestyle. Many countries create a new outlook in industrial and technical competition by increasing investment in the green logistics and supply chain field, formulating and implementing various bills, plans, and strategies, and strengthening the implementation of green economic development strategy. In the future, the range of this topic will not only be just remanufacturing, reverse logistics, and closed-loop supply chain. Low-carbon issues can be an important research direction.

Finally, multimethodology is an important direction for future study. Traditionally, major research methodologies in operations management can be classified into several categories, such as theoretical modeling, computation and simulations, surveys, cases, event studies, and behavioral experiments. In recent years, there is an emerging trend towards combining multiple research methodologies to explore research problems in logistics and supply chain management. For example, in addressing the issues of supply chain coordination, some papers establish the respective models and verify the findings by real-world cases and some papers conduct behavioral experiments with the goal of exploring the real-world relevance of some theoretical models. Moreover, the number of the papers with new applications of the existing methodology, such as cooperative game and behavior operations, is expected to grow continuously.