1- Select two journal articles related to the topics covered in the lecture between week 6 and week 10 (e.g., Supply Chain Management, Supply Network Design, SC agility/resilience, …).

2- Critically analyse each article by addressing the following:

a. What is the main research question/objective of the article? [50 – 100 words]

b. Discuss the methodology of how the objective was achieved. [150 – 250 words]

c. Explain the relevance between the article and the topic covered in the lecture. [150 – 250 words]

Digitized logistics integration, beside drastically decreasing manual work, opens the door for novel ways of optimizing the logistics processes and transport routes. It also enables real-time monitoring of transportation flows in order to react dynamically to unexpected circumstances. As a result, the integration of the newest Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) offers great potential to improve cost-effectiveness in logistics and enables new business models based on real-time economics. Today, 70% of companies lack operational performance data along the entire value chain, (World Economic Forum, 2016). Toface this issue within the European Union (EU), the long-term goals and the related roadmaps of the European Technology Platform ALICE (c.f. etp-logistics.eu) aim at a 10%–30% increase of efficiency in the EU logistics sector, which means EUR 100–300 billion cost relief for the European industry. A true “people, planet and profit” oriented logistics and supply chain sector contributes not only in industry competitiveness but also in meeting environmental policy targets. One of the main challenges in logistics is that various independent parties are involved (freight forwarders, 3rd party logistic service providers, multimodal transport operators, carriers, etc.). Communication between these parties needs to be accurate, and the associated necessity is to create a common platform where all parties share the necessary relevant information. Several attempts towards the implementation of such a platform were carried out in several past EU-funded research projects (such as CONTAIN, FREIGHTWISE, e-FREIGHT, or iCargo, c.f. containproject.com, freightwise.tec-hh.net, eutravelproject.eu), and recently by commercial products such as Uber Freight. The problem when adopting such approaches is that some organization needs to run the common platform. While having platform dominance often represents a good business opportunity for the company running the platform, other actors have to pay fees and follow the whims of the platform owner. Furthermore, a single gatekeeper poses a risk for diversity and fairness in the market. Multiple competing platform companies, on the other hand, create the risk of a splintered market resulting into non-optimal logistics decisions in separate silos.