Towards Sustainable and Human-centric Warehousing: a State of the art

Companies have been facing increasing pressures to adopt sustainable practices in their supply chains, with logistics nodes playing a crucial role in this regard. Characterised by an increasing complexity, they have been experiencing a fast technological transformation to cope with today’s ever rising challenges. The rapid advancement of technologies related to the Logistics 4.0 paradigm, and quickly evolving towards the Logistics 5.0 concept, are expected to facilitate the sustainable transition. In such transition, the role of manpower is still central in warehousing tasks, with human-technology interaction representing a significant challenge. Studies on human factor, human-technology interaction, and social sustainability at warehouses are emerging but are still under investigated. Besides, the intertwined implications of considering these topics simultaneously with the other sustainability perspectives (i.e., economic and environmental) have captured rising interest from both academia and industry, but research in this regard is still scarce. Few recent reviews aim at providing a more structured understanding of the overall topic. However, a comprehensive view of the overall subject is missing. The present paper addresses this gap by providing a state-of-the-art about the role of human factors in sustainable warehousing design the in the light of the Logistics 5.0 paradigm. A systematic review is developed based on PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses) protocol. Research limitations are discussed, and future research directions are outlined.