Special Issue on Hyperconnectivity in the Physical Internet

This special issue of the Journal of Supply Chain Management Science (JSCMS) presents four papers that were discussed at the 9th International Physical Internet Conference (IPIC) in 2023. The vision of Physical Internet (PI) has gone through a strong maturing process since its conception (Montreuil, 2011), both in terms of its practical articulation and scientific grounding. Recent reviews of the PI-literature (Treiblmaier et al., 2020; Pan et al., 2021; Chen et al., 2022; Nguyen et al., 2022; Cortés-Murcia et al., 2022) explicitly link the PI system concepts to its founding disciplines: industrial engineering (IE) and supply chain management (SCM). Together these PI innovation agendas have helped to involve IE and SCM researchers outside the PI community and have promoted the bundling of global R&D efforts into converging streams of work. In the light of these developments, JSCMS has offered to consider papers presented at IPIC 2023. The four selected and peer-reviewed contributions included in this special issue all revolve around the organization of high levels of connectivity between network services of individual carriers, leading to collaborative deployment of services in an integrated network. In the PI-jargon, this high-level connectivity is termed “hyperconnectivity”.