Autor: Jakub Piotrowski

Guaranteeing the quality of products and processes within supply chains is essential. Nevertheless, quality management is still restricted to production processes while logistics processes are normally not considered. IT infrastructures for exchanging quality data are often missing. Those needs can be addressed by using sensor systems in combination with a cross company exchange of sensor data based on EPCIS. In order to realise this approach, sensor systems, the EPCIS standard, decision support systems and business models need to be further developed.

One of the main challenges in urban logistic is the collaborated handling of freight transportation and urban public transport. Especially during peak periods, e.g. when commuters travel between their place of residence and place of work, the urban infrastructure for car traffic and public transport risks to collapse. In addition, often the freight transportation in urban areas competes with the public transport because of the use of the same road infrastructure. Therefore, it would make sense also to use free capacities of public transportations like trams for freight transports. First, this paper analyzes current concepts of urban logistics and concepts for the use of freight trams. Second, a new approach for the use of autonomous trolleys combined with the use of public trams will be introduced by the authors.

Logistic systems of automobile terminals are characterised these days by central planning and control processes, which do not allow fast and flexible adaptation of order processing to changing environmental influences caused by the dynamic and complexity in logistics. Process flows of cars on an automobile terminal such as delivery, storage and technical treatment are supported by a conventional, centralised logistic system. By establishing autonomous cooperating logistics processes, the automobiles will be enabled to act independently according to their own objectives and navigate through the logistics network themselves. This paper introduces first approaches of autonomous cooperation in the context of logistics and investigates potential applications in automobile logistics on the example of E. H. Harms Auto-Terminal-Hamburg GmbH & Co. KG.