Exploring congestion impact beyond the bulk cargo terminal gate

Bulk cargo terminal congestion management, approaches have tended to bealmost exclusively focused on the sea side of bulk terminals. To-date there hasbeen very limited work on land-side approaches to mitigate congestion in bulkterminals. This research aims to address these gaps by considering the effectivenessof multiple congestion management methods across a range of throughputscenarios. This paper develops a discrete event simulation model based on datacollected from an Australian bulk wood chip export maritime terminal and analysesthe effect of infrastructure and process improvements on gate congestionand hinterland logistics chains. The improvements include: variations of terminalconfigurations, a terminal appointment system and gate automation technology.This paper argues that traditional efficiency and utilization measures fail to capturethe impact of these alternatives over the whole hinterland logistics chain.Results indicate that the gate automation technology and the introduction ofan appointment system can reduce average turnaround times by approximately20%. Interestingly additional unloading capacity has a relatively small influence(<10%) on the average turnaround time under the initial truck arrival frequency.Significantly, findings highlight how the range of alternatives that improve efficiencyand utilization can be impaired when organizations do not plan andnegotiate impacts with other terminal users along the hinterland logistics chain.The impact of these alternatives needs to be evaluated in the broader hinterlandperspective to enhance stakeholder ’buy-in’ and resilience over time of solutionsimplemented

Dynamics in Logistics

This open access book highlights the interdisciplinary aspects of logistics research. Featuring empirical, methodological, and practice-oriented articles, it addresses the modelling, planning, optimization and control of processes. Chiefly focusing on supply chains, logistics networks, production systems, and systems and facilities for material flows, the respective contributions combine research on classical supply chain management, digitalized business processes, production engineering, electrical engineering, computer science and mathematical optimization. To celebrate 25 years of interdisciplinary and collaborative research conducted at the Bremen Research Cluster for Dynamics in Logistics (LogDynamics), in this book hand-picked experts currently or formerly affiliated with the Cluster provide retrospectives, present cutting-edge research, and outline future research directions

Current trends on ICT technologies for enterprise information s²ystems

The proposed paper discusses the current trends on ICT technologies for Enterprise Information Systems. The paper starts by defining four big challenges of the next generation of information systems: (1) Data Value Chain Management; (2) Context Awareness; (3) Interaction and Visualization; and (4) Human Learning. The major contributions towards the next generation of information systems are elaborated based on the work and experience of the authors and their teams. This includes: (1) Ontology based solutions for semantic interoperability; (2) Context aware infrastructures; (3) Product Avatar based interactions; and (4) Human learning. Finally the current state of research is discussed highlighting the impact of these solutions on the economic and social landscape

Dynamics in Logistics

This open access book highlights the interdisciplinary aspects of logistics research. Featuring empirical, methodological, and practice-oriented articles, it addresses the modelling, planning, optimization and control of processes. Chiefly focusing on supply chains, logistics networks, production systems, and systems and facilities for material flows, the respective contributions combine research on classical supply chain management, digitalized business processes, production engineering, electrical engineering, computer science and mathematical optimization. To celebrate 25 years of interdisciplinary and collaborative research conducted at the Bremen Research Cluster for Dynamics in Logistics (LogDynamics), in this book hand-picked experts currently or formerly affiliated with the Cluster provide retrospectives, present cutting-edge research, and outline future research directions

Understanding service modularity - antecedents, processes, and operationalization

The concept of service modularity has emerged as a promising solution to achieve a sound balance between growing customer requirements for individualization and a companya s necessity to standardize services for cost efficiency reasons. Although service modularity has been on the academic agenda for some time, not many examples of modularized service portfolios can be identified. Therefore, this dissertation aims to examine service modularity in the context of professional services by connecting the decisions made before, during, and after service modularization with a specific focus on the effect on the sales process. The enhanced understanding of the concept is expected to uncover new research gaps in service modularity, as well as promote its application in the context of professional services. Apart from its theoretical contribution, this dissertation will provide practitioners with an improved understanding with respect to what it means to offer a modular service portfolio, what needs to be done for the transformation, as well as what to expect from its completion

Supply chain risk management practice in Malaysian automotive industry

Organizations are experiencing increasing supply chain risks especially due to new business trends such as globalization and offshoring. For that reason, supply chain risk management is required to manage those risks effectively. Although there is a voluminous academic research on descriptive and conceptual model of supply chain risk management, evidences which describe the implementation of supply chain risk management in industry are limited. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to explore the implementation of supply chain risk management among Malaysian small and medium automotive companies. This study also explores the enablers to supply chain risk management implementation and barriers that impede this practice. Case study method was employed at three companies which were selected through purposeful sampling. By using thematic analysis, the data was analyzed and interpreted. The research results indicated that all three companies were heading towards more formal supply chain risk management implementation. Although the companies managed the supply chain risks based on TS16949 standard and company formal procedures, the tools used in the supply chain risk management, risk communication, training and risk responsibility were yet to be completely formalized. Pressure from customers and top management emerged as the primary enablers to such implementation. This study also revealed that barriers rooted from companies internal such as the lack of knowledge impeded the case companies from advancing their supply chain risk management implementation. The findings of this study offer a description of supply chain risk management implementation for organizations

Virtual Movement from Natural Language Text

It is a challenging task for machines to follow a textual instruction. Properly understanding and using the meaning of the textual instruction in some application areas, such as robotics, animation, etc. is very difficult for machines. The interpretation of textual instructions for the automatic generation of the corresponding motions (e.g. exercises) and the validation of these movements are difficult tasks. To achieve our initial goal of having machines properly understand textual instructions and generate some motions accordingly, we recorded five different exercises in random order with the help of seven amateur performers using a Microsoft Kinect device. During the recording, we found that the same exercise was interpreted differently by each human performer even though they were given identical textual instructions. We performed a quality assessment study based on the derived data using a crowdsourcing approach. Later, we tested the inter-rater agreement for different types of visualization, and found the RGB-based visualization showed the best agreement among the annotatorsa animation with a virtual character standing in second position. In the next phase we worked with physical exercise instructions. Physical exercise is an everyday activity domain in which textual exercise descriptions are usually focused on body movements. Body movements are considered to be a common element across a broad range of activities that are of interest for robotic automation. Our main goal is to develop a text-to-animation system which we can use in different application areas and which we can also use to develop multiple-purpose robots whose operations are based on textual instructions. This system could be also used in different text to scene and text to animation systems. To generate a text-based animation system for physical exercises the process requires the robot to have natural language understanding (NLU) including understanding non-declarative sentences. It also requires the extraction of semantic information from complex syntactic structures with a large number of potential interpretations. Despite a comparatively high density of semantic references to body movements, exercise instructions still contain large amounts of underspecified information. Detecting, and bridging and/or filling such underspecified elements is extremely challenging when relying on methods from NLU alone. However, humans can often add such implicit information with ease due to its embodied nature. We present a process that contains the combination of a semantic parser and a Bayesian network. In the semantic parser, the system extracts all the information present in the instruction to generate the animation. The Bayesian network adds some brain to the system to extract the information that is implicit in the instruction. This information is very important for correctly generating the animation and is very easy for a human to extract but very difficult for machines. Using crowdsourcing, with the help of human brains, we updated the Bayesian network. The combination of the semantic parser and the Bayesian network explicates the information that is contained in textual movement instructions so that an animation execution of the motion sequences performed by a virtual humanoid character can be rendered. To generate the animation from the information we basically used two different types of Markup languages. Behaviour Markup Language is used for 2D animation. Humanoid Animation uses Virtual Reality Markup Language for 3D animation

Selbststeuernde Disposition im Umlaufmanagement von Verleihartikeln

Being successful in global markets is a challenging task. Individual customer requirements induce a change from a seller-oriented towards a customer- oriented market. Further, technical advances lead to an adaption of production and logistic processes in individual companies and global networks. Therefore, the required methods are subject to manifold research projects. At this, the efforts reach from the development of new paradigms for the handling of complex and dynamic processes over the integration of modern information and communication technologies up to concepts for the implementation of production and logistic systems. Yet, the majority of methods show a good performance in academic scenarios, but lack an evaluation in practice. The presented work considers autonomous control in event logistics. At this, the application of methods from this field in a practice-oriented scenario is from central interest