**1. Introduction**

The term Logistics 4.0 comes from the concept of Industry 4.0, which has as main objective to optimize the production process of a factory by using new technologies (IoT, cobot, AIV, decision aided tools, etc.) and organization models (6 Sigma, lean manufacturing, etc.). Nowadays, it is possible to find several scientific and practical sources that prove the efficiency and benefits of the Industry 4.0 and Logistics 4.0 application in the production environment. However, within the health field, such as hospitals and pharmacies, these applications still have many opportunities to be explored. Indeed, the healthcare environment must reapply optimization existing concepts.

In 2020, European countries as much as the others in the world has discover the COVID pandemic, with a high impact on hospitals organization and the appearance of many logistics and safety problems. For instance, the management of patient flow and how to heal the sick with safety for nurses and hospital workers have to be solved. The good medicines dispatching in all hospital services is also a problem to optimize. The safety patient meal preparation and distribution could also be presented as a point to improve. The requisite but dangerous collection, distribution, washing of cloths in the frame of Covid pandemic are also problems to solve. These deficiencies became even more relevant to be overcome. This is due to two main

reasons. The first one is the low availability of time and number of employees in healthcare systems. The second reason is the way the virus spreads, that is through contact among people.

Having a real need and a problem to be solved, this project carried out a study showing how the Logistics 4.0 concepts can be implemented in a way to both optimize the process and contribute to the fight against the pandemic. The study will show how the implementation of logistics 4.0 could decrease the number of unnecessary contacts and consequently reduce the number of contaminated people inside hospitals. Indeed, the implementation of new technologies is crucial for healthcare professionals to be able to focus on the high demand of patients instead of wasting time on manual tasks.

The study presents a literature that contains the main methods and new technologies in the field of Industry 4.0, Lean Manufacturing, Logistics 4.0, and Healthcare 4.0 that can be used to solve the indicated problems. Then, concepts and methodology developed for solving these problems will be exposed. The elaborated general approach based on Case-based reasoning and generalization reasoning will contribute to the definition of a hospital flows reference model. Indeed, the general structure of the decision aided tool, based on artificial intelligence and being developed for helping hospitals in the process of logistics optimization will be shown. And finally, an example will be presented for illustrating how these concepts could be applied to improve hospital logistics in the frame of logistics 4.0, named here Healthcare Logistics 4.0.
