Sustainability

Industrial companies as well as small and medium sized enterprises engage themselves more and more in international production networks. Each networkpartner aims on building and maintaining business relationships to the best partner for any specific task. This leads to an increasing amount of goods being transported from partner to partner and leads to an immense logistics effort. These logistics tasks are responsible for major cost blocks in most companies. Organisations will have to react to the increasing demand for on time delivery with organisational as well as technological solutions to maintain their competitive advantage.

The dynamic business environment is a logistical challenge for the automotive industry. Original Equipment Manufacturers, suppliers and logistics service providers are dealing within a complex network, which makes adjustments of a single company still essential, but stresses the necessity of optimised cooperation in the automotive industry for efficient reaction. The main questions for the members of ForLog are to which situations with an impact on the logistics system players in the automotive network have to adjust and how important these situations are for each single player.

Producing companies are increasingly facing external dynamics. To remain successful in the long run their management will have to keep up to this challenge. Thus it is important to choose and implement the right concepts and instruments to deal with dynamics. This article offers an overview on different approaches and a closer insight into the concept of Supply Chain Event Management.

The globalization of markets and the increasing connectivity of IT enhance the dynamic and complexity of worldwide competition. Logistics becomes and essential competitive differentiator. But small and medium sized enterprises (SME) have difficulties to implement innovative solutions. This article shows how service provider can increase the competitiveness by taking over logistics modules from SME.

High dynamics and structural complexity in current and future logistic systems are complicating central planning and control. For enabling a more decentralised and autonomous control, communication between the elements of the logistical network are necessary for the provisioning of the information needed. This article details the modelling of the communication between the components. This modelling contains source and sink of the information as well as the amount of data, frequency of transmission, quality of service and the moment of transmission for a reasonable usage of the information. The technical feasibility with current and upcoming communication systems is evaluated under consideration of the model.

Nowadays, logistics is seen as a strategic management instrument in order to gain and sustain competitive advantages. New information and communication technologies have substantially changed the way value chains are designed and managed. The research center InterVal analyses internet technologies in the context of supply chain collaboration. One focus is on the evaluation of appropriate management concepts and related investments in technologies.

Currently the realisation of the Digital Factory as the strategic goal for the next five years has been identified by many manufacturing enterprises. To achieve an integrated system planning and operation, the work is aimed at a comprehensive computer-based modelling of all design characteristics, structures and processes of a factory. This article scrutinises the technique-centred process for the realisation of the Digital Factory, which is currently favoured due to pragmatic reasons, and presents - based on the models in the Digital Factory - a comprehensive integration concept. To ensure the users’ acceptance, a user-oriented process considering enterprise-organisational requirements is preferred.

Airports as trans-shipment centres, within the transport networks of the world-wide air transport, represent complex knots of huge logistic networks. Cargo handling at airports is significantly determined by the location, the design and dimensioning of the cargo terminal, as well as by the internal and external handling relations. The examination and implementation of the modelling and simulation of relevant processes within a realistic part of an air cargo network is the focal point of this article. Its aim is to evaluate and design air cargo processes between two air cargo hubs and their respective origin and destination airports as a whole. It is shown that individual approaches to reduce costs of the parties involved are not as efficient as considering the whole transport network including all external handling relations.

RFID systems are yet waiting for their breakthrough in logistics. Today, radio-based identification systems are restricted to closed-loop supply chains and selected high-value applications. Mass applications are still tested in first pilot projects. The article describes the state-of-art in RFID and the foreseeable technology roadmap. Today’s and future applications of RFID are discussed with a focus on retail and manufacturing logistics. Finally, the most important issues of standardization and privacy are addressed.

The new Collaborative Research Centre “Autonomous Cooperating Logistic Processes: A Paradigm Shift and its Limitations”, funded by the German Research Foundation, started on January 1st, 2004 at the University of Bremen. The objective of the new Collaborative Research Centre is systematic and broad investigation and application of “autonomy” as a new paradigm for logistic processes. For this, appropriate concepts and models as well as methods and tools are being researched and developed in twelve scientific sub-projects. In a later phase of the Collaborative Research Centre, the results of this research will be transferred into real logistic applications.