**1. Introduction**

In recent years, a rising number of production and service companies work only with suppliers that adhere to environmental standards and regulatory policies, which are drivers for sustainable supply chain operations. These standards and regulatory policies can be classified into nine groups: pollution bans, technology standards, performance standards, emission trading policies, taxes, subsidies, information policies, eco-labels, and sustainable procurement policies [1]. Sustainable supply chain solutions and sustainable distribution solutions are influenced by all of these policies and related fields.

The definitions define that sustainable distribution refers to the macroeconomic allocation of objects (final products). Microeconomic aspects should also be taken into consideration because green distribution is influenced by business decisions, while economic and financial policies are represented by macroeconomics. Green distribution includes a wide range of operations, including transportation, warehousing, loading and unloading, packaging and labeling, custom services, and marketing. This wide range of logistics-related operations must be performed as green as possible. Today, the new technologies of the fourth industrial revolution make it possible to gather information from large complex systems in the form of real-time failure data and status information, and use them for more sophisticated decision-making. Within the frame of this chapter, an optimization-based approach for the optimal design and operation of green distribution is described. The significance of a problem is based on the fact that the application of Industry 4.0 technologies and the transformation of conventional supply chain solutions into a cyber-physical system can increase availability, flexibility, efficiency, sustainability, and transparency. The research question of this work is the validation of the impact of cyber-physical solutions on green supply chains.

This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents a systematic literature review, which summarizes the research background of distribution processes in the green supply chain from a descriptive and content analysis point of view. Section 3 describes the model framework of green distribution processes, including both, the functional and the mathematical models. The model is focusing on the sustainabilityrelated aspects, including energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy costs. Section 4 discusses the numerical analysis of the defined optimization model and validates the expected impact of cyber-physical solutions on green supply chains. Conclusions, future research directions, limitations, and managerial impacts are discussed in Section 5.

## **2. Systematic literature review**

Within the frame of this systematic literature review, the following questions will be answered: What is the current state of the knowledge in the field of distribution in green supply chain solutions? Which methodologies can be used for the optimization of design and operation of green distribution systems? Which influencing factors are important from the environmental impact point of view? What are the main research gaps and limitations?

#### **2.1 Methodology of systematic literature review**

The systematic literature review can be divided into three main parts. The first part is the descriptive analysis, which focuses on the statistical analysis and numerical description of search results in Scopus. The second phase is the content analysis, where based on the results of the descriptive analysis the research topics and the scientific results are described and evaluated. The third part summarizes the results of descriptive and content analysis and focuses on the current state of knowledge, current research results, and research gaps (**Figure 1**).

The process of the systematic literature review includes the following main phases: (1) definition of search questions based on the available search fields in Scopus; (2) search process; (3) inclusion and exclusion process, where only journal articles were added from the different types of source types and non-English articles were excluded from the search results; (4) descriptive (statistical and numerical) analysis; (5)

*Supply Chain: A Modeling-Based Approach for Cyber-Physical Systems DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105527*

**Figure 1.**

*Process of the systematic literature review.*

content analysis, where the topics and research results are identified; (6) definition of consequences, identification of main research directions, research gaps, and bottlenecks.
