logistics

Autonomous vehicles are employed in intralogistics in order to transport work pieces between different workplaces. Previous guidance systems are based on wire-guided tracks or optical following of surface markings. In the first case, the possibility to change the production layout is rather limited. In the second case, abrasion can significantly decrease recognition rates. In contrast, humans easily succeed in navigation tasks, even in dynamic environments. A promising approach is therefore to apply a cognitively motivated spatial representation for autonomous vehicles. This article presents BA23, a set of 23 qualitative relations for qualitative spatial reasoning, and discusses its application in intralogistics.

With time, products lose their attractiveness on the market, technology becomes outdated or customer demands are no longer met. To keep up success, companies need to replace old products. This means a huge amount of product changes for a manufacturer that differentiates through customer-focused product design and continuous product innovations. Ramp-up and phase-out-management are critical factors of success. As the product life cycles shorten due to the dynamism of the technology and markets, payback periods for the development costs reduce, too. In order to maintain profitability or to increase it, it is necessary to minimise the cost and time of product changes. This article shows how logistics contribute handling a lot of complex ramp-ups and phase-outs with optimal cost and in a short time.

In future, classic logistical targets will be supplemented by the target “safeguarding of resources”. In view of the close chaining of logistic processes, holistic and sustainable approaches are needed to achieve an optimum oriented economic and ecological general condition of logistic systems. This article introduces the need of new strategies in logistics and the relevance of new concepts to increasing the logistical performance.

Due to the economic boom the demand for transport and logistic services increases dramatically in China. Experts promise for the Chinese logistics market a more than three times faster growth than for the German market. China offers not only cheap work force. With the accession to the WTO in 2001 the Chinese government liberalizes the logistics market. After outsourcing abroad and the integration of Chinese suppliers into the worldwide supply networks thousands of companies follow to China to open up the huge interior market with products as well as transport and logistic services.

Given the current and anticipated future economic development in China, annual growth rates around 10 % and the opening of the Chinese market to logistics services, foreign logistics service providers are expecting annual growth of 30 % in this particularly lucrative market segment. One of the greatest challenges is the lack of sufficiently qualified Chinese logistics experts. This presents foreign research organizations and enterprises an opportunity to become active in China.

Complexity of industrial enterprises increases. Responsible for this trend are external drivers like the individualisation of products, the fierce global competition and the speed of technological developments which lead to reduced product life and innovation cycles. Companies react to external complexity by building internal complexity, logistics as a cross functional unit is especially affected. For example, a great number of different customers demand a heterogenic product program which results in operating an increasing quantity of variants. Because of the growing internal complexity a lot of promising logistical solutions are not realised. This article shows an approach how to create an organisational framework - based on the formal principle “Modularisation” - which allows logistics to regain adaptability and mutability by reducing internal complexity.

Production planning within the Mercedes Car Group is challenged by reduction of development times while increasing the product portfolio and quality. New approaches were necessary to implement the factorys needs into the product development as early as possible. 5 Years ago the Digital Factory was founded to secure that no production is started without a digital validation of product, production process and tools. Today the final assembly planning at DaimlerChrysler follows an integrated workflow of final assembly, Logistics and facility planning.

Against the backdrop of increasing importance of ecological aspects within all company functions, logistics has to be repositioned to comply with upcoming ecological challenges. This article introduces the concept of ecologistics and its measures within all fields of corporate logistics. As an example distribution logistics is detailed in its effort to consider ecological relevant aspects within the planning and control and the configuration of logistical structures.

A crucial criterion for the competitiveness of logistic areas (besides the efficency of logistic processes) is cost transparency, i. e. the cost allocation to performed logistic services. Since logistic processes unlike production processes do not generate material goods but services, it is very common to find cost structures where traditional cost accounting systems lead to distortion of costs. Activity-based costing facilitates process-oriented cost calculation and cost allocation to service processes.

Autonomously controlled transportation processes require decision making of logistic objects regarding routing alternatives. In this contribution a multicriterial evaluation assessment procedure is introduced basing on the fuzzy hierarchical aggregation, adapted and further developed at the CRC 637 “Autonomous Control of Logistic Processes” at Bremen University. The main design focus was user-friendliness within autonomous control and other fields of application. The example of use is a hierarchical structure of the subcriteria characterising the routing alternatives of an autonomous package. It is shown that the procedure can consider unprecise and fuzzy formulated knowledge directly in the model, while parameter adjusting was reduced to a minimum. Different weightings and compensation effects of subcriteria are depicted. The contribution shows the evaluation on a two-subcriteria basis and the possibilities of multicriterial evaluation as well. The evaluation of hard and soft ...