East Midlands strategic distribution study

This study assesses the importance of the logistics sector to the economy of the East Midlands and provides an understanding of land requirements and demand for sites from logistics companies in the region in the short, medium and long term

SIMULATION-BASED EVALUATION OF RESERVATION MECHANISMS FOR THE TIME WINDOW ROUTING METHOD

Automated warehouses operated by a fleet of robots offer great flexibility, since fleet size can be adjusted easily to throughput requirements. Furthermore, they provide higher redundancy compared to common solutions for automated storage and retrieval systems.On the other hand, these systems require more complex control strategies to run robustly and efficiently. Special routing and deadlock handling strategies are necessary to avoid blocking and collisions among the robots.In this contribution, we focus on the time window routing method, an approach for avoiding deadlocks byreserving routes in advance. We present and discussdifferent reservation mechanisms that are evaluated bythe means of simulation.Automated warehouses operated by a fleet of robots offer great flexibility, since fleet size can be adjusted easily to throughput requirements. Furthermore, they provide higher redundancy compared to common solutions for automated storage and retrieval systems. On the other hand, these systems require more complex control strategies to run robustly and efficiently. Special routing and deadlock handling strategies are necessary to avoid blocking and collisions among the robots. In this contribution, we focus on the time window routing method, an approach for avoiding deadlocks by reserving routes in advance. We present and discuss different reservation mechanisms that are evaluated by the means of simulation

Mission scheduler for a rail guided vehicle system

A transport system with automatic guided vehicles AGVs, is a fully automatic system that provides logistics services in industrial environments such as warehouses and production plants. These systems have reached such a degree of maturity as to allow, in their daily use, the application of heuristic algorithms for the optimization of the various operations they perform. For instance, find the shortest paths between working stations and storage area, assign movements and strategic positions for idle vehicles, operate efficient and long-life battery management and more. A relevant interesting algorithm, presented and developed in this thesis, concerns the sorting of products in the shipping phase, which affects the scheduling tasks assigned to the autonomous vehicles. The scheduler has the aims of determining which operations have more strict constraints and more priority over others. Studies and practice have shown that the adoption of a valid scheduler implies considerable improvements in the system performance, consequently it is advisable to dedicate time and effort to the research for the right one. The following algorithms obtained a successful outcome and they have been implemented for the production of a modern automated warehouse located in the city of Cesena, Italy. The paper is divided into four chapters, with a further one dedicated to conclusions

Planning of Truck Platoons: a Literature Review and Directions for Future Research

A truck platoon is a set of virtually linked trucks that drive closely behind one another using automated driving technology. Benefits of truck platooning include cost savings, reduced emissions, and more efficient utilization of road capacity. To fully reap these benefits in the initial phases requires careful planning of platoons based on trucks’ itineraries and time schedules. This paper provides a framework to classify various new transportation planning problems that arise in truck platooning, surveys relevant operations research models for these problems in the literature and identifies directions for future research

Sustainable development in contract logistics through green warehousing and distribution. Practical case: Maersk warehouse

The thesis is dedicated to the staple part of contract logistics – warehousing and distribution. The nature of this study is to show the sustainable development of (green) warehousing, the crucial changes and achievements in the sector and how these improvements impact the environment and society. The author appeals to the research and analytical methods where he investigates the sources and related documents to analyse the global situation in contract logistics and describe the current situation of green warehousing. The practical method helped to study the Maersk warehouse and to show if it indeed responds to the requirements of sustainable durability as well as highlights the transformations conducting the company towards decarbonisation. The first part dedicated to the general research of warehousing and distribution. The author investigated the main features of warehouse location and its crucial importance, studied different types of layouts, showed the modernisation and application of WMS facilitating the operation’s running, examined the efficiency of equipment usage, light and air conditioning systems and analysed the social impact of warehousing for sustainability. The second chapter observes the practical case of Maersk warehouse as the first logistic centre for the company in Iberia area. The author not only investigated the main features of warehouse, but also showed how the company is implementing the sustainable tools to reduce the environmental impact as well as gave at the glace the future of warehousing via innovation and technology usage

Interoperability challenges for context aware logistics services - the case of synchromodal logistics

Due to diverse and increased demands, logistics needs to move towards being more context-aware. Logistic planning and execution will benefit immensely by use of (real-time) contextual data, such as data about weather, traffic, and resources. Resulting benefits include better flexibility, lower greenhouse gas emission, reduced costs, and optimum usage of transport modalities. This paper demonstrates the benefits and investigates the interoperability challenges of integrating contextual data in synchromodal transport. A data format for incoming contextual data is presented