Organizational Unit:

Physical Internet Center

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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/72222

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Organizational Unit

Supply Chain and Logistics Institute

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 119

Stochastic Service Network Design with Different Relay Patterns for Hyperconnected Relay Transportation

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-06) Li, Jingze ; Liu, Xiaoyue ; Dahan, Mathieu ; Montreuil, Benoit

Hyperconnected relay transportation enables using a relay system of short-haul drivers to deliver long-haul shipments collectively, which helps address root causes of trucker shortage issues by transforming working conditions with potentials of daily returning home, accessing consistent schedules, and facilitating load matching. This Paper investigates hyperconnected relay transportation as a sustainable solution to trucker shortage issues through a logistics platform. We propose a two-stage programming model to optimize consistent working schedules for short-haul drivers while minimizing transportation costs. The first stage involves opening services and contracting truckers under demand uncertainty, where each service has a service route and approximate service schedules adhering to USA federal short-haul hour-of-service regulations. The second stage assigns hauling capacities to open services and manages commodity shipping or outsourcing given the demand realization. We extend the model formulation to account for various operational patterns (e.g., freight loading and unloading or hauler swapping) and schedule consistency requirements (e.g., weekly or daily consistency). A scenario-based approach is employed to solve the model for a case study of automotive delivery in the Southeast USA region. The experimental results validate the proposed approach, and further explore the impact of stochastic demands, operational patterns, consistent schedules, and hauling capacities on hyperconnected service network design. This research aims to offer practical guidance to practitioners in the trucking industry.
Environmental impact assessment of intercontinental transport network with digital twin under PI framework

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-06) Cipres, David ; Lopez Ramon, Jose Luis ; De la Cruz, M. Teresa

This Paper evaluates the impact of collaborative transport strategies and emerging technologies on an intercontinental transport network with a digital twin. The study assesses the effects of applying Physical Internet (PI) concepts and enabling technologies, such as Internet of Things, blockchain, and artificial intelligence, on the performance of the transport network, including key indicators such as carbon emissions, delivery performance, and logistics costs. Results show that implementing PI concepts and integrating these technologies can lead to improvements in environmental and economic indicators. Despite these benefits, there are several challenges to overcome, including the integration of these technologies into existing logistics systems, coordination among stakeholders, security and confidentiality. Overall, the study demonstrates the potential of these technologies and concepts to contribute to sustainable transportation systems, but further research is needed to evaluate their feasibility and scalability in real-world transportation networks, as well as to develop strategies to address the challenges.
Hyperconnected Logistic Service Networks: Bidding-Based Design Framework

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-06) Kwon, Simon ; Montreuil, Benoit ; Dahan, Mathieu ; Klibi, Walid

In hyperconnected urban logistics, all components and stakeholders are connected on multiple layers through standardized interfaces and open networks to achieve seamless responsiveness, efficiency, resilience, and sustainability. Key for high performance is achieving coordination and cooperation of urban stakeholders. In this Paper, we introduce the design of hyperconnected logistic service networks where associated logistic activities to move flows within an urban city are outsourced to third-party logistic service providers (3PL) via a bidding process to create service networks that are highly responsive and flexible at robustly responding to customer demand. We propose a framework for designing such networks that leverages a reverse combinatorial auction mechanism in which a logistic orchestrator serves as the auctioneer, putting out the logistic activities for auction and a set of participating service providers serve as bidders. We describe the design components of hyperconnected service networks and positions them into a comprehensive 3-stage design-making framework. Finally, we identify promising future research avenues for each stage in the proposed framework.
Hyperconnected Urban Synchromodality: Synergies between Freight and People Mobility

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-06) Labarthe, Olivier ; Klibi, Walid ; Montreuil, Benoit ; Deschamps, Jean-Christophe

This Paper investigates the opportunity to exploit an on-demand freight transshipment service in urban areas. This contribution attempts at first to focus on the feasibility to connect people and freight mobility with a joint usage of transportation options. It builds on the hyperconnectivity principles enabled by the Physical Internet (PI) manifesto for city logistics. To this end, this Paper proposes an effective solution approach for optimizing multimodal on-demand transshipment. The approach considers multiple mobility options such as on-demand delivery services, cargo bikes, tramways, and buses to transship goods from an urban logistic hub to another. The hyperconnected synchromodal mobility solution is proposed as an alternative option to classical pickup and deliverybased transportation. The proposal is first characterized in link with the interconnectivity needs and then its operability is modeled as a new transportation approach. The proposed solution aims to increase the sustainability of cities by reducing congestion levels, the impact of logistics moves, as well as carbon emissions in urban areas. An illustrative case is provided to demonstrate how the novel hyperconnected synchromodal transportation system could operate, and to provide an evaluation of the economic and sustainability benefits of such system in an urban context.
How to monitor the social and public impact of the Physical Internet

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-06) Schiavone, Giuseppina

Social and public impact plays a relevant role in successful Governance, Access and Adoption of the Physical Internet (PI) as defined in the ALICE Roadmap. Processes for continuous detection, tracking and monitoring of environmentalsocial-governance (ESG) aspects able to capture the benefits of incremental solutions’ deployment for the PI require gathering, processing and modeling of complex data.
Hyperconnected Urban Parcel Delivery Network Design with Tight Delivery Service Requirements

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-06) Kwon, Simon ; Leveque, Johan ; Klibi, Walid ; Stauffer, Gautier ; Montreuil, Benoit

The advent and growth E-Commerce has led to not only a huge increase in demand for rapid and guaranteed transport/delivery services, but also in the numbers of vehicles entering and leaving urban cities to deliver goods and services, clogging the roads and polluting the air. Seeking efficient usage of resources is inarguable. Motivated by these challenges, this Paper studies the design of hyperconnected parcel network design in line with the Physical Internet initiatives, modelling it as a coalition-formation game. The objective is to design a cooperative parcel delivery network among multiple delivery actors such that the actors within the same coalition can share resources. We develop a case study of La Poste to understand the impact of coalitional decisions and cost-sharing methods on the global and individual network design cost.
Performance of Self Organizing Logistics: a Practical Comparison between Centralized and Decentralized Logistics

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-06) Fransen, Ruben ; Sprenger, Lola ; Lee, Wan-Jui ; van Meijeren, Jaco

In the vision of Physical Internet there is no central authority that regulates decision making and asset use, the decision making is decentralized to make logistics self-organizing. A theoretical downside of decentralization is reduction of system performance due to lack of system overview leading to sub-optimal decisions. This research shows that the system performance is not significantly reduced when making decentralized decisions in a trucking network on small problem instances. Furthermore, the theoretical advantages of decentralized control compared to centralized are evaluated with the practical implementation.
Robust logistics service network design for perishable products with uncertainty on transportation time

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-06) Pang, Yaxin ; Pan, Shenle ; Ballot, Eric

Disruptions in logistics, including local disruptions (technical issues, out-of-service warehouse, etc.) or mega-disruptions (pandemic, wars, earthquakes, etc.), have dramatically raised industrial practitioners’ concern to the shipment delay which damages the logistics service quality. The problem is particularly sensitive to perishable products, e.g. fresh produce, vaccine, medicine, which are usually of short shelf life. It is significant to respect the shelf life since their value (or functionality) deteriorates remarkably with time. Delayed (or uncertain) logistics services can lead to deteriorating commodity quality even waste. Therefore, shippers of perishable products pursue robust solutions on product distribution to guarantee the service quality, including the freshness and on-time delivery under the uncertainty of transportation time. This work from the shippers’ perspectives investigates logistics service network design problem (LSNDP) under uncertainty. Traditional LSNDP aims to achieve the best tradeoffs between service quality and operational costs at the tactical planning level (Crainic, 2000). Based on that, this work integrates service selection with traffic distribution under a multi-modal transportation network with uncertain transportation time, where multi-modal transport services are combined together during transportation, i.e. maritime, air, railway and road way. However, the design of service timetable and frequency is not considered as we focus on route and service selection. This work also aims to contribute to Physical Internet (PI), a new logistics paradigm suggesting global, open and interconnected logistics systems. Under a such paradigm which is fundamentally different to the current practices, it is possible to dynamically organize the logistics service even in the presence of disruptions. Previous works have shown that it may enable more flexibility, agility and delivery options to mitigate disruptions (Yang et al., 2017). This work investigates how PI can enhance LSNDP under uncertainty of transportation time. Stochastic programming and robust optimization are the two common paradigms applied in the literature to deal within logistics uncertainty. Stochastic programming assumes that uncertainty can be described by exact probability distribution. Robust optimization, by contrast, assumes that uncertainty cannot be described explicitly by a such distribution, but only subject to a certain rang of deviation from the nominal value. In such setting, robust optimization is a paradigm studied for finding feasible and robust solution for all cases of the uncertainty, in other words, via using a minmax objective against the worst-case. This work adopts robust optimization for several reasons. Firstly, in the presence of mega-disruptions or unpredicted disruptions, it is hard to catch the probability distribution information or the impacts which are required by stochastic programming. Secondly, due to the short and strict shelf life, and high sensitivity to lead-time, perishable product shippers have relatively lower tolerance to shipment delay and consequently incline towards conservative solutions on transportation service selection to realize the best tradeoff between costs and service quality. Given that, we apply classic robust optimization with budget-of-uncertainty proposed by (Bertsimas & Sim, 2003), which can control the conservative level of solutions. We assume that shippers know the information on the nominal value and the maximum deviation range of transit time (including transshipment time at hub and transportation time to the next hub) of each service on each arc called service-arc. The uncertainty of transit time is modeled as a deviation degree from the nominal value. The worst-case of uncertainty is modeled as the longest transportation time of each order. To control the conservatism level of the solution, a budget-of-uncertainty, pre-determined by decision-makers, is enforced on the total deviation degree of transit time on all service-arcs. To find out the robust solutions, a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model is proposed to minimize the total costs for shippers, which include transportation cost, transshipment cost, deteriorating cost and early or late delivery cost, with budget-of-uncertainty constraints. At this stage, numerical studies with fictive datasets have been conducted to validate the model, solved by CPLEX solver run on MATLAB. The first numerical results show that the developed model may deliver robust solutions on route and transportation service selection that satisfy all constraints (in particular all products must be delivered before the expiration date) while minimizing the total costs. Sensitivity analysis is carried out on the setting of budget-of-uncertainty, the degree of uncertainty, and shelf life of products, to investigate the tradeoffs between total costs and service quality. The next steps will focus on the real-life case data collection and tailed algorithm design. Managerial insights from the results on real cases will be provided to the industrial practitioners.
Autonomous vehicles in all weather conditions: steering towards a harmonized legislative framework enabling real-life deployment

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-06) Zotos, Ted ; Couëlle, Victoire ; Ronke, Rebecca ; Schallauer, Dominik ; Travers, Guillaume ; Turkovic, Jasmina

This Paper presents and discusses the current status of testing and operation regulations for automated vehicles (AVs) at EU level. Current legal conditions for on-road testing and operation of autonomous vehicles vary strongly from country to country. This Paper will focus on examples of European countries that have taken an advanced stance in the formulation of policies and rules (Austria, Norway, France) and developed national policies which already enable on-road testing and operation. This Paper will identify and put forward a set of best practices that will support the review of existing and future legislation as the basis of a harmonized EU legal framework designed to give clear signals to the industry, regulators and the general public. Particular attention will be placed on ensuring that safety performance requirements are met across all Operational Design Domains (ODD). Taking adverse weather conditions into consideration will allow to reflect a more adequate real-life environment for AV operations. Updated regulations must ensure the safety of automated vehicle operations while providing some degree of flexibility, rather than imposing specific restrictions to enable future development and deployment of AVs. The technical work carried out under the EUfunded Horizon-2020 programme and more specifically the AWARD project provides the laying ground for the development of frameworks enabling the safe testing and deployment of autonomous vehicles for logistics operations onto public roads.
Consumers' perspective on automized circular packaging for e-grocery deliveries

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-06) Pfoser, Sarah ; Brandner, Manuela ; Achatz, Alexander ; Schauer, Oliver ; Ponweiser, Wolfgang ; Prandtstetter, Matthias

In recent years, the continuous rise in packaging waste has been primarily attributed to the growing popularity of e-commerce. Currently hardly any reusable or circular packaging schemes have been implemented in Austrian e-commerce operations. The reason is mostly because there is no cost-effective way to realize reusable packaging as handling are critical to the profitability of the packaging scheme. To address this circumstance and potentially promote the further implementation of circular packaging, the aim of this Paper is to present a new circular packaging technology which is based on automized and modular packaging units. For the success of such a new packaging technology, consumers have a critical influence. Therefore, a survey is conducted to evaluate consumers’ perceptions on circular packaging for e-grocery deliveries. The delivery of deep-frozen bakery products will be taken as a use case to study the acceptance of circular packaging. Consumers are aware of the sustainability problems bound up with packaging waste. Consumers attach a very high importance to sustainable packaging. However, the survey results also show that consumers are rather convenient. They appreciate personal delivery service and only a small number of survey participants are open to using new delivery concepts.