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CRC 637  >>  Subprojects  >>  Project Group B  >  B7

B7 – Autonomous adaptation of vehicle routes and schedules in dynamic environments

Prof. Dr. Herbert Kopfer

Universität Bremen
Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaft
Lehrstuhl für Logistik (LfL)
Wilhelm-Herbst-Str. 5, 28359 Bremen, Germany
Tel: +49 421 218 66920, Fax: +49 421 218 66922
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Motivation

Efficient and reliable road transport is one prerequisite to achieve sustainable profitability of supply chains. Only this mode of transport is able to perform a distribution of highly aggregated as well as unconsolidated shipments of different products. Increasing competition and cost sensitivity of customers lead to more and more sophisticated standards for managing complex but nevertheless reliable transport processes. The consideration of up-to-date planning information produces and addresses a high degree of dynamics within the deployment planning of transport resources. Coping with these dynamics is the major challenge recent transport managers are faced with. Existing methodological support from Operations Research as well as Artificial Intelligence can only be exploited to a certain extend to revise and update existing transport processes...

Results Phase 1 (2004-2007)

In accordance with the intended research goals of the first project period, the potentials of autonomously controlled adjustments of planning system to varying process environments have been investigated. In order to enable the exploitation of autonomous control for the management of transport processes, the online optimisation meta-method has been extend in a way that allows the adaptation of a particular decision problem instance to the current state of the environment. Special attention has been paid to the integration of superior longer term objective like reliability or punctuality and minor short term objectives like cost minimisation. This issue has been identified as a crucial topic for the realisation of benefits resulting from the application of autonomous control.

Objectives Phase 2 (2008-2011)

The second phase of this research project addresses the filtering of incoming transportation requests with the goal to achieve a load balancing over the transport ressources over time in order to increase the efficiency of the generated transport processes. This project investigates how autonomous control can be used to enable a freight carrier to balance its work load over time. As pragmatic goal, the development and implementation of software agent prototypes for an experimental validation of the theoretic concepts is targeted. Three project milestones are defined: (1) an analysis of request selection approaches and the implementation of an autonomously controlled approach for the selection of profitable requests (2) the exploration and implementation of capacity control approaches that use autonomous control (3) the integration of request selection, capacity control and vehicle routing in an autonomously controlled agent system.

Project Staff

PD Dr. Jörn Schönberger

Universität Bremen
Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaft
Lehrstuhl für Logistik (LfL)
Wilhelm-Herbst-Str. 5, 28359 Bremen, Germany
Tel: +49 421 218 66929, Fax: +49 421 218 98 66929
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Dipl.-Kfm. Sebastian Sterzik

Universität Bremen
Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaft
Lehrstuhl für Logistik (LfL)
Wilhelm-Herbst-Str. 5, 28359 Bremen, Germany
Tel: +49 421 218 66927, Fax: +49 421 218 98 66927
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Dipl.-Wi.-Ing. Xin Wang

Universität Bremen
Fachbereich Wirtschaftswissenschaft
Lehrstuhl für Logistik (LfL)
Wilhelm-Herbst-Straße 5, 28359 Bremen, Germany
Tel: +49 421 218 66924, Fax: +49 421 218 98 66924
E-Mail , Homepage