BlockELM A Public Blockchain Freight Exchange Protocol

Freight exchanges are central to the logistics industry, as they reduce empty runs and meet spot demands. To improve their efficiency in terms of automation and enhance trust between the participants, we propose a decentralized freight exchange implemented using public blockchains. With our solution, we also address shortcomings of public blockchains, such as scalability and privacy. We present two artifacts: a general architecture for an electronic logistics marketplace (ELM) and a concrete implementation as the proof of concept for a freight exchange. The solution is implemented using two off-the-shelf public blockchains and a public distributed file system. Additionally, we investigate the implications for the general ELM model and show that an ELM based on a blockchain can be viewed as infrastructure rather than a market participant

Characterization of Multi-agent systems: A systematic mapping study

Multi-agent systems have gained a lot of interest in articles, conferences and magazines. However, it is still a recent issue which is not understood or the scope of it is unknown. The objective of this work is to investigate in more detail the articles and to build a preliminary classification system to structure the field of Multi-agent systems. As a result, an overview of this area of research can be obtained through the response to the research questions posed. Resumen. Los sistemas multi-agente han ganado un interés muy grande en artículos, conferencias y revistas. Sin embargo sigue siendo un tema reciente el cual no se comprende ni se conoce los alcances del mismo. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo investigar con más detalle los artículos y construir un sistema de clasificación preliminar para estructurar el campo de los sistemas Multi-agente. Como resultado, se espera proporcionar una visión general de esta área de investigación a través de responder a las preguntas de investigación planteadas. Creemos que el presente trabajo será una herramienta que encontrará ámbitos todavía aun no investigados

From Network to Web dimension in supply chain management

Cette thèse soutient que la dimension réseau, étant actuellement la portée du domaine de la gestion de chaîne logistique, contraint l’avancement de ce domaine et restreint des innovations conceptuelles et fondamentales capables d’adresser les grands défis économiques, environnementaux et sociaux. Les concepts de chaîne et de réseau ne reflètent pas la complexité des flux physiques, informationnels et financiers générés par les interactions qui ont lieu dans des réseaux interconnectés. Ces concepts n’offrent pas les fondations théoriques pour supporter des interventions allant au-delà d’un seul réseau et laissent échapper des opportunités nécessitant une vision multi-réseau. Ainsi, la dimension “web”, celle des réseaux de réseaux, est proposée comme une extension de la dimension réseau. Cette extension peut être vue comme l’étape naturelle suivante dans la progression qui a commencé par le niveau de gestion des opérations internes, est passée au niveau de la chaîne logistique et se trouve actuellement au niveau du réseau logistique. Après l’investigation théorique des raisons et de la façon d’intégrer la dimension web dans le domaine de la gestion de la chaîne logistique, la thèse étudie des implications importantes de cette intégration sur la collaboration inter-organisationnelle et le processus de prise de décision dans des environnements de webs logistiques. Elle démontre, en exploitant l’exemple des réseaux interconnectés ouverts, des potentialités inimaginables sans une vision web. Une méthodologie de conception d’un modèle de simulation permettant l’évaluation et la comparaison des webs ouverts par rapport aux webs existants est proposée. Puisque l’aide à la décision est une composante importante de la gestion de la chaîne logistique, la thèse contribue à déterminer les besoins des gestionnaires et à identifier les lignes directrices de la conception des outils d’aide à la décision offrant le support adéquat pour faire face aux défis et à la complexité des webs logistiques. Ces lignes directrices ont été compilées dans un cadre de conception des logiciels d’aide à la décision supportant la dimension web. Ce cadre est exploité pour développer quatre applications logicielles offrant aux praticiens et aux chercheurs des outils nécessaires pour étudier, analyser et démêler la complexité des webs logistiques.This thesis argues that the network dimension as the current scope of supply chain management is confining the evolution of this field and restricting the conceptual and fundamental innovations required for addressing the major challenges imposed by the evolution of markets and the increased intricacies of business relationships. The concepts of chain and network are limitative when attempting to represent the complexity of physical, informational and financial flows resulting from the interactions occurring in overlapping networks. They lack the theoretical foundations necessary to explain and encompass initiatives that go beyond a single chain or network. They also lead to overlook substantial opportunities that require beyond a network vision. Therefore, the “web” dimension, as networks of networks, is proposed as an extension to the network dimension in supply chain management. This new scope is the natural next step in the progression from the internal operations management level to the supply chain level and then to the supply network level. After a theoretical investigation of why and how the web dimension should be integrated into the supply chain management field, the thesis studies and discusses important implications of this integration on inter-organisational collaboration and of the decision-making processes in the logistic web environments. It demonstrates through the example of open interconnected logistic webs some of the potentials that cannot be imagined without a web vision. A methodology for designing a simulation model to assess the impact of such open webs versus existing webs is proposed. Since decision support is a key element in supply chain management, the thesis contributes to determine the needs of supply chain managers and identify the important axes for designing decision support systems that provide adequate assistance in dealing with the challenges and complexity presented by logistic web environments. The identified elements result in the establishment of a foundation for designing software solutions required to handle the challenges revealed by the web dimension. This conceptual framework is applied to the prototyping of four applications that have the potential of providing practitioners and researchers with the appropriate understanding and necessary tools to deal with the complexity of logistics webs

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

Sustainable Freight Transport

This Special Issue of Sustainability reports on recent research aiming to make the freight transport sector more sustainable. The sector faces significant challenges in different domains of sustainability, including the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the management of health and safety impacts. In particular, the intention to decarbonise the sector’s activities has led to a strong increase in research efforts—this is also the main focus of the Special Issue. Sustainable freight transport operations represent a significant challenge with multiple technical, operational, and political aspects. The design, testing, and implementation of interventions require multi-disciplinary, multi-country research. Promising interventions are not limited to introducing new transport technologies, but also include changes in framework conditions for transport, in terms of production and logistics processes. Due to the uncertainty of impacts, the number of stakeholders, and the difficulty of optimizing across actors, understanding the impacts of these measures is not a trivial problem. Therefore, research is not only needed on the design and evaluation of individual interventions, but also on the approach of their joint deployment through a concerted public/private programme. This Special Issue addresses both dimensions, in two distinct groups of papers—the programming of interventions and the individual sustainability measures themselves

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

Blockchain-Based Digitalization of Logistics Processes—Innovation, Applications, Best Practices

Blockchain technology is becoming one of the most powerful future technologies in supporting logistics processes and applications. It has the potential to destroy and reorganize traditional logistics structures. Both researchers and practitioners all over the world continuously report on novel blockchain-based projects, possibilities, and innovative solutions with better logistic service levels and lower costs. The idea of this Special Issue is to provide an overview of the status quo in research and possibilities to effectively implement blockchain-based solutions in business practice. This Special Issue reprint contained well-prepared research reports regarding recent advances in blockchain technology around logistics processes to provide insights into realized maturity

Efficient Communication in Agent-based Autonomous Logistic Processes

Transportation of goods plays a vital role for the success of a logistics network. The ability to transport goods quickly and cost effectively is one of the major requirements of the customers. Dynamics involved in the logistics process like change or cancellation of orders or uncertain information about the orders add to the complexity of the logistic network and can even reduce the efficiency of the entire logistics process. This brings about a need of integrating technology and making the system more autonomous to handle these dynamics and to reduce the complexity. Therefore, the distributed logistics routing protocol (DLRP) was developed at the University of Bremen. In this thesis, DLRP is extended with the concept of clustering of transport goods, two novel routing decision schemes and a negotiation process between the cluster of goods and the vehicle. DLRP provides the individual logistic entities the ability to perform routing tasks autonomously e.g., discovering the best route to the destination at the given time. Even though DLRP seems to solve the routing problem in real-time, the amount of message flooding involved in the route discovery process is enormous. This motivated the author to introduce a cluster-based routing approach using software agents. The DLRP along with the clustering algorithm is termed as the cluster-based DLRP. In the latter, the goods are first clustered into groups based on criteria such as the common destination. The routing is now handled by the cluster head rather than the individual transport goods which results in a reduced communication volume in the route discovery. The latter is proven by evaluating the performance of the cluster-based DLRP approach compared to the legacy DLRP. After the routing process is completed by the cluster heads, the next step is to improve the transport performance in the logistics network by identifying the best means to transport the clustered goods. For example, to have better utilization of the transport capacity, clusters can be transported together on a stretch of overlapping route. In order to make optimal transport decisions, the vehicle calculates the correlation metric of the routes selected by the various clusters. The correlation metric aids in identifying the clusters which can be transported together and thereby can result in better utilization of the transport resources. In turn, the transportation cost that has to be paid to the vehicle can be shared between the different clusters. The transportation cost for a stretch of route is calculated by the vehicle and offered to the cluster. The latter can decide based upon the transportation cost or the selected route whether to accept the transport offer from the vehicle or not. In this regard, different strategies are developed and investigated. Thereby a performance evaluation of the capacity utilization of the vehicle and the transportation cost incurred by the cluster is presented. Finally, the thesis introduces the concept of negotiation in the cluster based routing methods. The negotiation process enhances the transport decisions by giving the clusters and the vehicles the flexibility to negotiate the transportation cost. Thus, the focus of this part of the thesis is to analyse the negotiation strategies used by the logistics entities and their role in saving negotiation time while achieving a favorable transportation cost. In this regard, a performance evaluation of the different proposed strategies is presented, which in turn gives the logistics practitioners an overview of the best strategy to be deployed in various scenarios. Clustering of goods aid in the negotiation process as on the one hand, a group of transport goods have a stronger basis for negotiation to achieve a favorable transportation price from the vehicle. On the other hand it makes it easier for the vehicle to select the packages for transport and helps the vehicle to operate close to its capacity. In addition, clustering enables the negotiation process to be less complex and voluminous. From the analytical considerations and obtained results in the three parts of this thesis, it can be concluded that efficient transport decisions, though very complex in a logistics network, can be simplified to a certain extent utilizing the available information of the goods and vehicles in the network

Designing Data Spaces

This open access book provides a comprehensive view on data ecosystems and platform economics from methodical and technological foundations up to reports from practical implementations and applications in various industries. To this end, the book is structured in four parts: Part I “Foundations and Contexts” provides a general overview about building, running, and governing data spaces and an introduction to the IDS and GAIA-X projects. Part II “Data Space Technologies” subsequently details various implementation aspects of IDS and GAIA-X, including eg data usage control, the usage of blockchain technologies, or semantic data integration and interoperability. Next, Part III describes various “Use Cases and Data Ecosystems” from various application areas such as agriculture, healthcare, industry, energy, and mobility. Part IV eventually offers an overview of several “Solutions and Applications”, eg including products and experiences from companies like Google, SAP, Huawei, T-Systems, Innopay and many more. Overall, the book provides professionals in industry with an encompassing overview of the technological and economic aspects of data spaces, based on the International Data Spaces and Gaia-X initiatives. It presents implementations and business cases and gives an outlook to future developments. In doing so, it aims at proliferating the vision of a social data market economy based on data spaces which embrace trust and data sovereignty

Sustainable Freight Village Concepts for Agricultural Products Logistics - A Knowledge Management-oriented Study

Freight villages (FVs) are logistics phenomenon with broad economic, environmental, and social consequences. This research extends sustainability in the context of FVs to twofold meanings. This includes the sustainable development of FVs, and the sustainability contributions they created. China has showed a more recent but quicker story in developing FVs. Nevertheless, a number of problems and limits exist. Taking China as research background, this research consists of theoretical explorations, status quo analysis, and practical applications in agricultural products logistics (APL). This research proposes that knowledge management (KM) is the most desirable option to reach sustainable values of FVs. The status quo analysis examines the adaption of FVs to China s current logistics situation. It identifies several orientations for the next development step of FVs. To cope with the pervasive problems during FV planning stage, this research adopts sense-making KM approach to guide a systematic planning process including sense making, knowledge creation, and decision making. In order to achieve a high sustainability rating, this research uses KM cycle model to generate synergies among major stakeholders of FVs. Moreover, it proposes a roadmap for organizing KM process so as to build sustainability capability. Three key elements for the roadmap are identified: human ability, stakeholder engagement, and information system. This research focuses on the application of sustainable FV concepts for agricultural products logistics (APL). It deals with issues affecting city logistics and agricultural products (agri-products) supply in China. This can make best use of FV functions from a sustainability perspective. Agri-FV is proposed to bring professional logistics facilities and services, efficient distribution of agri-products, and information-based operations. An integrated APL system is structured consisting of farmers cooperatives, chain stores, and agri-FVs. In this system, agri-FV plays an important role in levering sustainability outcomes. Furthermore, KM approaches are applied to agri-FV project planning and operations, meanwhile considering the characteristics of agri-products and APL