Are research and practice in the future of warehousing aligned?

This paper investigates the alignment between research and practice in the context of the "warehouse of the future." It employs a text mining approach to analyze and compare publications from both scientific and grey literature, aiming to identify key concepts and trends. The methodology involves collecting and preprocessing documents, text cleaning and tokenization, TF-IDF vectorization, dimensionality reduction, topic modeling and clustering, and cluster interpretation. A concept map, based on a taxonomy of warehouse management aspects and trends, is used to compare the two sources of documents. Results highlight misalignments between research and practice, with research focusing on traditional warehousing problems and operational details, while practitioners prioritize industry trends and technology. The study concludes by suggesting future research directions, including improving the concept map and data collection methods, and using the concept map as a support tool for content analysis.