Exploring the social impacts of adopting autonomous vehicles in the supply chain

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have served the logistics sector in the form of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) for decades. With the advent of Industry 4.0 (In 4.0 – the Fourth Industrial Revolution) in 2011, significant advances have been witnessed (Schwab, 2016). Rapid development of innovations such as robots and drones indicates wider adoption across the industry (Tang and Veelenturf, 2019). Logistics giants such as Alibaba and JD.com in China, and DHL and Amazon in Europe and the USA are applying or testing autonomous vehicles for use in supply chain processes including distribution and storage (Merlino and Sproģe, 2017; Mohamed et al., 2020). Further, Zipline is a successful drone delivery service provider in medical supplies for African countries (Scott and Scott, 2017). However, compared with the rapid progress of technology, current academic research and development of knowledge in this area is lagging behind (Van Meldert and De Boeck, 2016; Monios and Bergqvist, 2020), especially in freight transport (Flämig, 2016; Van Meldert and De Boeck, 2016). Previous studies have focussed particularly on developing the drone Vehicle Routine Problems (VRP) or Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), to minimise costs and negative environmental externalities from a number of perspectives (Murray and Chu, 2015; Ha et al., 2018). These studies have demonstrated significant positive economic and environmental sustainability performance (Tang and Veelenturf, 2019). The social perspective has received less focus.