Facilitating Storage Operations and Trading with Autonomous Systems for Hong Kong’s Wine Industry

As one of the leading wine ports in Asia, Hong Kong has successfully positioned itself as the hub of wine trading and distribution in Mainland China, particularly for the Greater Bay Area. Although the wine hub is famous for its convenient location, free port policy, and efficient customs clearance in providing high value-adding services, its wine operations facilities are less referred to as a strength. To enhance real-time monitoring and reduce human error in various wine operations as well as to facilitate wine trading in the region, autonomous systems provide self-contained logistics systems that bring huge potential benefits to Hong Kong’s wine industry. This paper presents a theoretical framework analysis by identifying the potential use of autonomous systems for the 9 codes of practice under Wine Storage Management Systems (WSMS) Certification. Taking reference from the autonomous intralogistics systems model proposed by Fottner et al., this paper identifies the relevant wine operations and trading tasks and provides examples of the actual use of autonomous technology at each level of autonomous intralogistics system. Based on the results of the framework analysis, this paper discusses the potential autonomous systems to be adopted in Hong Kong’s wine industry. This paper advocates the quick adoption of robotic wine cellars in the short term and also proposes a greater collaboration of autonomous systems used in inventory management and existing B2B e-commerce platforms for wine in the long term.