Engineering logistics innovations for the Physical Internet

The Physical Internet (PI), as a compelling vision for future logistics systems, aims to secure the availability and sustainability of worldwide freight movements. In the PI, shipping costs would be half of what they are today, while services would be fully customized and flexible, thanks to global standards for shipment packaging and information, automated and AI-driven decision making, and full asset sharing. During recent years, the US, Europe, China and Japan have been shaping the PI’s innovation roadmap. The complexity of this transition is daunting, due to the fundamental changes needed in governance and technology, with many stakeholders involved, on a global scale. We argue that the role of engineers needs to be reimagined to create this transition, from technology-focused specialists for niches of systems, to designers of socio-technical systems of systems. Engineers need to interact with practice, adopt new quantitative modelling approaches to stakeholder-sensitive design, and embrace living lab processes supported by multi-layered digital twins. Failure to do so may lead to delayed adoption or unanticipated, unwanted side effects. Recent studies and cases are presented from the Netherlands to exemplify these new approaches.