Metaverse Adoption and Implementation in Logistics and Supply Chain Management: Challenges, Issues and Opportunities

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Introduction

The term metaverse was first introduced by Neal Town Stephenson in 1992 in Snow Crash, a science fiction. Metaverse is an immersive 3D internet platform where programmable avatars of humans can interact with each other and digital agents mimicking the physical world and its experiences on the screen. The metaverse users can create their virtual avatars, i.e., digital replicas of their physical selves. The metaverse encompasses a broad category of emerging technologies to create a new and unconventional business model (Dwivedi et al., 2022; Dolgui and Ivanov, 2023). The metaverse and its variants, such as the virtual world, 3D virtual environment, second life, extended reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, and augmented reality, are going to offer unprecedented opportunities to organisations for their growth and progress. 
Metaverse is likely to have critical implications within the logistics and supply chain domain. Various operations including forecasting, warehousing, maintenance, and resource allocation can be transformed with the aid of the metaverse. Organisations should have dynamic sensing capabilities to scan the environment, evaluate the technologies and seize the opportunities of the metaverse (Zabel et al., 2023). However, like any other socio-technical phenomena, the metaverse comes with an array of challenges that require careful attention from academia, industry, and policymaking bodies. As the metaverse adoption in logistics and supply chain is still in its nascent stage, practical, social, ethical, and technological issues need to be discussed among the stakeholders. Some of the issues include standardisation, interoperability, regulation, data protection, data sharing, digital assets, privacy, addiction, and ethical concerns like cyberbullying, virtual identity theft, societal bias, etc. (Richter and Richter, 2023; Yang, 2023; Maheshwari et al., 2023). 
This SI aims to initiate a debate and deliberation on the challenges (feasibility, interoperability, privacy, safety, etc.), issues (political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental, etc.), and opportunities of the metaverse across logistics and supply chain processes (forecasting, logistics planning, inventory management, production planning, resource allocation, etc.).

List of Topic Areas

Topics for this special issue include, but are not limited to, the following 

1. Theoretical underpinning of the metaverse adoption intention of firms in logistics and supply chain 
2. Geographic and cultural contexts of metaverse adoption and diffusion in logistics and supply chain 
3. Use of gamification in metaverse for better consumer experience and engagement 
4. Interactive learning of logistics and supply chain stakeholders in an immersive digital environment 
5. Collaborative physical-metaverse forecasting of demand 
6. Data-driven decision making in logistics and supply chain through metaverse 
7. Integrated production planning for physical and metaverse products 
8. Augmented reality based maintenance of facilities 
9. Role of metaverse in minimising disruptions in supply chains 
10. Augmentation of economic, environmental, and social performances of logistics and supply chain by metaverse 
11. Metaverse related privacy and security concerns in the logistics and supply chain 
12. Ethical issues of metaverse in logistics and supply chain

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here. 
Author guidelines must be strictly followed. Please see here.  

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to ““Please select the issue you are submitting to”.
Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal

Key Deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 01/11/2023 
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31/07/2024

References

Dwivedi, Y.K., Hughes, L., Baabdullah, A.M., Ribeiro-Navarrete, S., et al., (2022), Metaverse beyond the hype: multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging challengesopportunities, and agenda for research, practice and policy, International Journal of Information Management, 66, 102542. 
Dolgui, A., and Ivanov, D., (2023), Metaverse supply chain and operations management, International Journal of Production Research, doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2023.2240900 
Maheshwari, P., Kamble, S., Kumar, S., Belhadi, A. and Gupta, S. (2023), Digital twin-based warehouse management system: a theoretical toolbox for future research and applications, The International Journal of Logistics Management, https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-01-2023-0030 
Richter, S., Richter, A. (2023), What is novel about the Metaverse? International Journal of Information Management, 73, 102684 
Yang, L. (2023). Recommendations for metaverse governance based on technical standards. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10, 253. 
Zabel, C., O'Brien, D. and Natzel, J. (2023), Sensing the Metaverse: The micro foundations of complementor firms’ dynamic sensing capabilities in emerging technology ecosystems, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 192, 12256.