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Physical Internet (PI) has emerged as an open global logistics system in which physical, digital and operative interconnectivity are combined by units, interfaces and protocols. The PI initiatives have revolutionized the logistics industry, which significantly promotes logistics sustainability, digitalization and the interconnection of logistic services. Since the inception of PI in 2010, there has been significant and increasing interest from both academia and practitioners, leading to remarkable advancements in related research and development. Conducting a comprehensive review of the most up-to-date works related to the PI can help researchers recognize emerging research directions to systematically and effectively advance the research toward the next stages of PI. Thus, this paper consists of a systematic literature review (SLR) of the field. This review shows that digitalization is the key enabling force of PI, and how digitalized cyber space affects PI is still unclear. This motivates us to analyse the necessities and rationales for accessing the Cyber-Physical Internet (CPI). Then, the fundamental CPI model is designed with a five-layer architecture, which acts as the OSI model in the computer network, to define the underlying working mechanisms of each layer for maintaining an open, cooperative and scalable CPI. Finally, future research directions are summarized to illustrate the major research and development roadmap to innovative CPI to make this next-generation logistics as simple as sending email.
Wu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.