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The purpose of this paper is to explore the current trends, implications and challenges of information systems (IS) related to omni-channel logistics.

An exploratory survey study is conducted with 23 Swedish retail companies transforming to omni-channel logistics. The study investigates the retailers’ current situations regarding logistics IS as well as their perceptions of the future development.

From the perspective of leading Swedish retailers, omni-channel requirements drive the implementation of new IS to support effective and efficient material handling across the network and in the respective nodes. The shifting roles and increase in the number of handlings nodes will require flexible IS platforms that can support multiple flows and integrated inventory. The major increase in the implementation of new, critical functionalities is related to real-time, multi-criteria decision making on order allocation to different handling nodes. More advanced IS functionality is also required in material-handling nodes to support the increased degree of automation and continuous improvements with the aim to shorten order-to-delivery lead times. A number of challenges are identified that must be addressed during the transformation to omni-channel logistics, especially related to the growing complexity and decentralization of networks, tougher lead-time requirements and larger product assortments.

To support further theory development, 11 propositions related to trends and a schematic framework conceptualizing implications and challenges are submitted for testing in future research.

The study highlights several aspects related to logistics IS that are important for practitioners to consider as they undergo the transition to omni-channels. It provides insights into IS functionalities that are likely to grow in use and criticality for supporting material handling and inventory management in increasingly complex and decentralized networks. In particular, the authors stress the need to implement functionality that works across previously separated handling nodes and decision areas. Managers can also use the propositions to reflect on what the near future holds and as input for their own scenario analyses.

Previous research has primarily focused on technology that supports the front-end customer experience. This study is original in that it explores the trends, implications and challenges for logistics IS in omni-channels – an area that has not been explored in detail previously. It also studies both perceived and expected changes over time related to the transformation toward omni-channel logistics.

Severe disruptions to maritime supply chains, including port closures, congestion and shortages in shipping capacity, have occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper’s purpose is to explore flexibility-based countermeasures that enable actors in maritime supply chains to mitigate the effects of disruptions with different characteristics.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with shipping lines, shippers, forwarders and ports. Data on the COVID-19 pandemic's effects and countermeasures were collected and compared with data regarding the 2016–2017 Gothenburg port conflict.

Spatial, capacity, service and temporal flexibility emerged as the primary countermeasures, whilst important characteristics of disruptions were geographical spread, duration, uncertainty, criticality, the element of surprise and intensity. Spatial flexibility was exercised in both disruptions by switching to alternative ports. During the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring capacity flexibility included first removing and then adding vessels. Shipping lines exercising service flexibility prioritised certain cargo, which made the spot market uncertain and reduced flexibility for forwarders, importers and exporters that changed carriers or traffic modes. Experience with disruptions meant less surprise and better preparation for spatial flexibility.

Understanding how actors in maritime supply chains exercise flexibility-based countermeasures amid disruptions with different characteristics can support preparedness for coming disruptions.

Comparing flexibility-based measures in a pandemic versus port conflict provides insights into the important characteristics of disruptions and the relevance of mitigation strategies. The resilience of maritime supply chains, although underexamined compared with manufacturing supply chains, is essential for maintaining global supply chain flows.

The current outbreak of COVID-19 is an unprecedented event in air transportation. In this study, we investigate the impact of COVID-19 on global air transportation through the lens of complex networks different at different scales, ranging from worldwide airport networks where airports are nodes and links between airports exist when direct flights exist, to international country networks where countries are contracted as nodes, and to domestic airport networks for representative countries/regions. We focus on the spatial-temporal evolutionary dynamics of COVID-19 in air transportation networks, discovering hidden patterns on flight frequency reduction. Our study provides a comprehensive empirical analysis on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on aviation from a complex system perspective.

This editorial establishes the broader context for debating how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the global supply chains, logistics, and transportation networks in the world. The COVID-19 pandemic is an unknown-unknown risk whereby the probability of its occurrence and the possible consequences of a risk event cannot be foreseen. Furthermore, the characteristics of COVID-19 differentiate it from previous disasters in terms of the geographic scope of the impact, and the supply- and demand-side impacts, and are making relevant research challenging. In this special issue, the interwoven relationships between the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges facing global supply chains, logistics, and transportation are discussed, along with a literature review. Selected papers on air transportation networks, emergency logistics, and digital trade are theoretically and empirically probed.

Resilience in agri-food supply chains (AFSCs) is an area of significant importance due to growing supply chain volatility. While the majority of research exploring supply chain resilience has originated from a supply chain management perspective, many other disciplines (such as environmental systems science and the social sciences) have also explored the topic. As complex social, economic and environmental constructs, the priority of resilience in AFSCs goes far beyond the company specific focus of supply chain management works and would conceivably benefit from including more diverse academic disciplines. However, this is hindered by inconsistencies in terminology and the conceptual components of resilience across different disciplines. The purpose of this study is to use a systematic literature review to identify which multidisciplinary aspects of resilience are applicable to AFSCs and to generate a novel AFSC resilience framework.

This paper uses a structured and multidisciplinary review of 137 articles in the resilience literature followed by critical analysis and synthesis of findings to generate new knowledge in the form of a novel AFSC resilience framework.

Findings indicate that the complexity of AFSCs and subsequent exposure to almost constant external interference means that disruptions cannot be seen as a one-off event; thus, resilience must concern the ability to not only maintain core function but also adapt to changing conditions.

A number of resilience elements can be used to enhance resilience, but their selection and implementation must be carefully matched to relevant phases of disruption and assessed on their broader supply chain impacts. In particular, the focus must be on overall impact on the ability of the supply chain as a whole to provide food security rather than to boost individual company performance.

The research novelty lies in the utilisation of wider understandings of resilience from various research fields to propose a rigorous and food-specific resilience framework with end consumer food security as its main focus.

A globalized world demands proactive tactics from organizational supply chains. Companies should be capable of mitigating the impacts of natural and manmade disasters, which requires that they understand their stages of maturity and resilience. This study develops a theoretical model of the relationship between maturity and resilience, seeking to guide decision-making about aligning these two concepts.

A systematic literature review was conducted to identify the constructs that form the basis for our proposed maturity and resilience model.

The authors identified the key constructs related to maturity and resilience by analyzing the existing literature and selected 13 constructs and 3 maturity stages to construct our maturity and resilience model.

This research contributes to the supply chain management literature, especially that involving the themes of maturity and resilience. It can encourage research to develop future empirical research in the field to validate and overcome the limitations of the initial model the authors propose.

The authors’ proposed model supports supply chain managers in establishing strategies to increase resilience based on the maturity of the chains they manage, enabling them to face crises such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

The model presents a holistic view of maturity and resilience in supply chains contributing to supply chain theory by examining the alignment between the two themes.

Construction projects operate within a risky environment. It materialises as delays, which must be prevented or mitigated to avoid becoming amplified into late completion. But previous research has largely ignored how structural complexity of the underlying network schedules shapes their resilience.

This research hypothesizes that schedule structure plays a vital role in its ability to absorb or propagate delays. The impact of activity-level local risk factors is represented via activity duration distributions, i.e. probability density functions. The impact of project-level global risk factors is more challenging because they arise via interactions between multiple activities.

Modelling resilience to local and global risk factors can employ a matrix approach. Simulation shows that delay amplification depends on local structure, not global complexity.

Criticality had merely relied upon a single deterministic analysis of a network schedule to categorize activities as having zero or nonzero float from fixed relative duration a dependency structure. Repeated probabilistic analysis with sampled durations gives criticality indices of activities. This research limits itself to network schedules with point-wise relations between activities.

Managers can use this knowledge to develop schedules that protect their expected project duration with a suitable structural complexity.

Contributions to the body of knowledge are as follows: It converts the dependency structure into a reachability matrix and adds a correlation matrix to capture how the predecessor performance may impact its successors. It correlates criticality of activities with structural complexity indices. And it ranks activities objectively by their cruciality, i.e. potential delay propagation.

Resilience concepts in integrated urban transport refer to the performance of dealing with external shock and the ability to continue to provide transportation services of all modes. A robust transportation resilience is a goal in pursuing transportation sustainability. Under this specified context, while before the perturbations, robustness refers to the degree of the system’s capability of functioning according to its design specifications on integrated modes and routes, redundancy is the degree of duplication of traffic routes and alternative modes to maintain persistency of service in case of perturbations. While after the perturbations, resourcefulness refers to the capacity to identify operational problems in the system, prioritize interventions and mobilize necessary material/ human resources to recover all the routes and modes, rapidity is the speed of complete recovery of all modes and traffic routes in the urban area. These “4R” are the most critical components of urban integrated resilience.

The trends of transportation resilience's connotation, metrics and strategies are summarized from the literature. A framework is introduced on both qualitative characteristics and quantitative metrics of transportation resilience. Using both model-based and mode-free methodologies that measure resilience in attributes, topology and system performance provides a benchmark for evaluating the mechanism of resilience changes during the perturbation. Correspondingly, different pre-perturbation and post-perturbation strategies for enhancing resilience under multi-mode scenarios are reviewed and summarized.

Cyber-physic transportation system (CPS) is a more targeted solution to resilience issues in transportation. A well-designed CPS can be applied to improve transport resilience facing different perturbations. The CPS ensures the independence and integrity of every child element within each functional zone while reacting rapidly.

This paper provides a more comprehensive understanding of transportation resilience in terms of integrated urban transport. The fundamental characteristics and strategies for resilience are summarized and elaborated. As little research has shed light on the resilience concepts in integrated urban transport, the findings from this paper point out the development trend of a resilient transportation system for digital and data-driven management.

The research approach is based on the concept that a failure event is rarely random and is often generated by a chain of previous events connected by a sort of domino effect. Thus, the purpose of this study is the optimal selection of the components to predictively maintain on the basis of their failure probability, under budget and time constraints.

Assets maintenance is a major challenge for any process industry. Thanks to the development of Big Data Analytics techniques and tools, data produced by such systems can be analyzed in order to predict their behavior. Considering the asset as a social system composed of several interacting components, in this work, a framework is developed to identify the relationships between component failures and to avoid them through the predictive replacement of critical ones: such relationships are identified through the Association Rule Mining (ARM), while their interaction is studied through the Social Network Analysis (SNA).

A case example of a process industry is presented to explain and test the proposed model and to discuss its applicability. The proposed framework provides an approach to expand upon previous work in the areas of prediction of fault events and monitoring strategy of critical components.

The novel combined adoption of ARM and SNA is proposed to identify the hidden interaction among events and to define the nature of such interactions and communities of nodes in order to analyze local and global paths and define the most influential entities.

Over the past decade, researchers have witnessed an exponential growth in the number of publications on IR. This paper aims to understand the state of the art of the research field and to highlight the areas where further academic research is needed, guiding developments in theory, research, policy and practices.

The authors apply the dynamic literature review method called “Systematic Literature Network Analysis”, which combines systematic literature review and bibliographic network analysis. Furthermore, to overcome some of the limitations connected to the methodology, the authors integrate the literature with a manual content analysis of papers.

IR adoption and practices and their determinants represent the most analyzed aspects of literature. Over time, attention has been paid to more specific issues, such as the relationship between IR and other disclosure mechanisms, IR quality and its assurance, the critical analysis of the IR framework and principles and difficulties in IR adoption. Although the literature on IR can be considered to be in its mature stage, many aspects are still under-researched, so there is plenty of space for future research.

The authors propose the following main issues as subjects to be investigated in future studies: IR is not simply an evolution of sustainability reporting, but an innovative communication tool; the debate on who the recipients of value are (shareholders or stakeholders) and on what the definition of value adopted by IR is still remains an open issue; more attention should be given to the role of IR as a managerial tool, which could support strategy formation and communication, and influence internal processes of performance measurement and evaluation; what the future of IR will be in light of recent EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and new ISSB's standards is still an open question. From a methodological perspective, little is known about structured approaches in accounting studies. The authors confirm how methodologies, such as that of this paper, may be exploited as a tool to support dynamic analysis for setting the agendas for future studies in the accounting field.