Transport and Logistics - Events

Last Updated on Monday, 09 August 2010 18:07

2nd LANCS Workshop on Transportation & Green Logistics

Workshop on Vehicle Routing and Scheduling

The Transport and Logistics research cluster of the LANCS Initiative is collaborating with Optrak Distribution Software to run a two-day workshop on vehicle routing and scheduling. The aim is to bring together academics working in vehicle routing and scheduling and professionals working in the transport/logistics area. Details of the workshop are:

• Date/time: 23-24 September, 2010, with registration starting at 10.30 on Thursday 23^rd and a finish at about 16.00 on Friday 24^th September.
• Venue: Birmingham Conservatoire; for directions, see
  

  http://www.conservatoire.bcu.ac.uk/about/directions 

• Registration fee: £30 per person

The workshop programme will contain state-of-the-art talks on solution techniques for some of the most common variants of the vehicle routing problem. A keynote address will be provided by Daniele Vigo from the University of Bologna. In addition, there will be presentations from companies highlighting some of the problems arising in practice that can benefit from academic input. Tim Pigden from Optrak will describe some of these challenges in his presentation.

It is planned that there will be ample opportunity for interaction during the workshop, with a view to defining potential research projects and forming collaborative teams for tackling these projects.

For more details about the scope of the workshop, contact either of the following:

Professor Chris Potts, E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , Tel: 023 8059 3651

Professor Richard Eglese, E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , Tel: 01524 593869

For administrative enquiries, please contact:

Rosemary Hindley, E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , Tel: 01524 592937

Forms:

• Credit Card Slip Proforma docx   doc
• T&L Workshop Sept 2010 registration form docx   doc

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1st LANCS Workshop on Transportation & Green Logistics

This meeting was held on 1st and 2nd April 2009, at the University of Southampton, in the School of Management. The organizers were Chris Potts and Richard Eglese. The organising secretary was Yvonne Richardson.

About 32 people attended part or all of the workshop. Most were staff and PhD students from Lancaster, Nottingham, Cardiff and Southampton universities, though there were a few invited speakers in addition.

The first part of the workshop dealt with Transportation and the second day covered Green Logistics.

The purpose of the workshop was to achieve three goals:

 (i) To present some current research already started in the two areas;

 (ii) To discuss issues relevant to industry, government and other organisations;

 (iii) To identify future research topics and opportunities for cooperation.

The programme for the first day was as follows:

10:30  Register

11:00  Welcome and Introduction, Chris Potts (Southampton)

11.15  Rail Transport, John Preston (Transport Research Group, Southampton)

11.45  Road Transport, Pengjun Zheng (Transport Research Group, Southampton)

12.15  Transport Research at Lancaster, Richard Eglese (Lancaster)

12.45  Lunch

13.50  Transport Research at Nottingham, Jason Atkin (Nottingham)

14.50  Transport Research at Southampton, Chris Potts, Nik Pearson, Christine Currie (Southampton)

15.30  Coffee

16.00  Freight Planning, Andy Emmons, Bashir Khan (Transport for London)

16.30  Discussion on future plans and collaborations.

The programme for the second day was as follows:

Richard Eglese (Lancaster) gave an introduction to the Green Logistics area and summarised some of the current work at Lancaster. This included some potential new research on Assortment Planning Problems with Stein Wallace, who is a new professorial appointment at Lancaster under the LANCS initiative who will be starting in June 2009. Lancaster contributions to the EPSRC funded consortium on Green Logistics were outlined, particularly on vehicle routing and scheduling with time-varying speeds which is led by Richard Eglese and supported by RA, Dan Black and PhD student, Jiani Qian.

Tolga Bektas (Southampton) described how OR models may be applied at three different levels: operational, tactical and strategic. He described current research at the operational level with Gilbert Laporte (Montreal) on the pollution-routing problem where the vehicle routing problem is modified to take account the relationship between fuel consumption and factors such as speed and weight. At the tactical level he described current research into planning an intermodal transportation network. This can be modelled as a mixed integer programming problem but the complete model is difficult to solve. Some work suggests that solutions that minimise CO2 may be very different from those minimising economic cost. Tolga also briefly described the work at Southampton on Cutting & Packing problems led by Julia Bennell, where the objective of minimising waste could be regarded as a green objective. There may be the opportunity for further research that combines three-dimensional packing with vehicle routing.

Martyn Cayley (Faber Maunsell) described the Freight Best Practice programme which is sponsored by the DfT. Information and guides can be obtained from the website www.freightbestpractice.org.uk and copies of a leaflet "FreightFuture Essentials" were made available. Martyn explained that although much of the work so far had been for road freight transport, they were doing more work in the multi-modal area and results on barriers to entry for different modes of freight transport were due by the end of the month. He noted that large companies were already pursuing greener policies, e.g. TESCO have set themselves the target of a reduction in the amount of CO2 used in the distribution network of 50% by 2011 compared with 2006. However 85% of all goods vehicle fleets have 5 vehicles or less so help and incentives are needed for small operators to improve their logistics operations. Some guides and tools are therefore targeted at small operators. Martyn also described the on-line benchmarking tool that allows companies to compare their performance with others according to a variety of KPIs.

Tom Cherrett (Southampton) started by describing current issues in vehicle routing: combining plans using 3PLs and own fleet, dynamic routing & planning using current traffic information, integrating tachograph data with scheduling. He went on to discuss issues connected to home delivery: arrangements made for failed deliveries (when nobody is in to receive the delivery), new VRP problems incorporating the decision of when to divert to a dropping-off point for failed deliveries. Finally he discussed issues connected with the transportation of waste. Different recycling schemes give rise to new routing and scheduling problems. The location of vehicles and the types of vehicles used need consideration. Tom described possible benefits from monitoring how full bins are at dispersed collection sites and the concept of "Freight traffic control" to allocate loading and unloading slots (possibly using vacant bus stops) in crowded town centres. 

Steve Disney (Cardiff) described issues in inventory management due to the dynamics of demand in a supply chain. He described the Bullwhip effect in traditional supply chains and some of the advantages of a vendor managed inventory approach, particularly on the ability to operate with full truckloads. He then described the dynamics of closed loop supply chains where some material may be recycled (e.g. disposable cameras). Inventory routing models can reduce transportation (and hence the emissions from transportation). There are some challenging mathematical models to solve in this context that are currently dealt with using linear approximations or simulation. Finally Steve examined models for distribution network design showing that bullwhip costs, as well as inventory costs, follow a "square root law" with implications for the number of distribution centres to use.

Bashir Khan and Andy Emmonds (Transport for London) spoke at the end of the first day on issues relevant to both Transport and Green Logistics. Bashir Khan briefly described some of the features of the London Freight Plan. Good operators are given recognition in their scheme by the award of "FORS". Current projects are examining logistics in the construction industry in London and the London Food Infrastructure Project aims to improve sustainability in the distribution of food in the capital. Andy Emmonds is Director of Road Network Performance and described current work to improve the information available on journey times. The data comes mainly from cameras that read the number plates of vehicles. He described some of their current techniques for removing outliers, patching the data (when cameras fail), profiling the data. They are currently designing the best way to be able to visualise the network to summarise the information. Current work suggests that the cost of congestion may have been underestimated in the past and that freight vehicles tend to travel at about the same speed as other operators in London.

 The workshop concluded with about 45 minutes of open discussion concerning the issues that had been identified and the scope for further research. Some of the research might involve new appointments of lecturers and research assistants through the LANCS initiative. The LANCS initiative should also mean support for an increased number of PhD students, some of whom might work on issues identified during the day. Individuals will follow up connections to look at the scope for designing new research projects, some of which may lead to new research grant applications. 

Those who attended the 2nd day can download the presentations from the following (password protected) links:

http://www.lancs-initiative.ac.uk/internal/apr09/andyemmonds.ppt
http://www.lancs-initiative.ac.uk/internal/apr09/bashirkhan.ppt
http://www.lancs-initiative.ac.uk/internal/apr09/martyncayley.pdf
http://www.lancs-initiative.ac.uk/internal/apr09/richardeglesegreenlogistics.pdf
http://www.lancs-initiative.ac.uk/internal/apr09/stevedisney.pdf
http://www.lancs-initiative.ac.uk/internal/apr09/tolgabektas.pdf
http://www.lancs-initiative.ac.uk/internal/apr09/tomcherrett.pdf