Trends in transportation and logistics

Problems in transportation and logistics had to be tackled long before computers and Operational Research (OR) became available to support decision making. After the first optimization models were developed, OR has substantially contributed in making transportation systems efficient and companies with complex transportation and logistics problems competitive. Over the years, technology has evolved and the same has done OR. In this paper, the history of problems and OR contributions in transportation and logistics will be shortly reviewed together with the evolution of technology. Then, the future trends in this area will be discussed together with potential OR contributions.