Planning and Operation of Interconnected Intelligent Logistics Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Supply chains have become more and more complex because of the increasing diversity of customer demands. The state-of-the-art technologies in a variety of engineering disciplines, information sciences and computational engineering necessitate building physical and logical linkages among different supply chains to create additional flexibility and plasticity enabled by the hyperconnected resources. As a result, the separated supply chain structure is underlying a transition to an interconnected intelligent logistics system, for example, the Physical Internet (Ballot et al. 2014, Pan et al. 2017), Intelligent logistics (McFarlane et al. 2016, Sallez et al. 2016), or hyperconnected logistics (Crainic and Montreuil 2016). During this transition, there are many technical and economic challenges to be addressed, such as system planning, operation management, IT integration, business model, which require interdisciplinary research (Bányai et al. 2017). The optimal design and operation of interconnected intelligent logistics systems can led to increased efficiency, traceability, utilization, availability and capability while operation cost and ecological footprint is decreased.

We invite researchers in the global logistics community to contribute original research papers, as well as review articles and empirical studies, which will stimulate debate in the topic.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• analytic and heuristic optimisation of supply chain and interconnected intelligent logistics systems;
• simulation of large scale interconnected intelligent logistics systems,
• decision-making in networking logistics,
• information management in large scale logistic systems,
• Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing and Made in China 2025 from the aspect of interconnected intelligent logistics systems,
• business models in cooperative logistic solutions,
• application of intelligent sensor networks in coordination of large scale supply chain,
• new engineering solutions in interconnected intelligent logistics.
• interconnected intelligent logistics for sustainability

References

Ballot, E., B. Montreuil and R. Meller (2014). The Physical Internet: The Network of Logistics Networks. Paris, France, La documentation Française. 978-2-11-009865-8

Bányai Á., Bányai T., Illés B. (2017). "Optimization of consignment store based supply chain with black hole algorithm." Complexity. Paper 6038973. http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2017/6038973.

Crainic, T. G. and B. Montreuil (2016). "Physical Internet Enabled Hyperconnected City Logistics." Transportation Research Procedia 12: 383-398. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.trpro.2016.02.074.

McFarlane, D., V. Giannikas and W. Lu (2016). "Intelligent logistics: Involving the customer." Computers in Industry 81: 105-115. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compind.2015.10.002.

Pan, S., E. Ballot, G. Q. Huang and B. Montreuil (2017). "Physical Internet and interconnected logistics services: research and applications." International Journal of Production Research 55(9): 2603-2609. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2017.1302620.

Sallez, Y., S. Pan, B. Montreuil, T. Berger and E. Ballot (2016). "On the activeness of intelligent Physical Internet containers." Computers in Industry 81: 96-104. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compind.2015.12.006.

Dr. Tamás Bányai
Dr. Shenle Pan
Guest Editors

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