Management of mobile resources in Physical Internet logistic models
This addresses logistical inefficiencies for supply chain and logistics industries, but appears incremental as it builds on existing Physical Internet concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of managing mobile resources like containers in Physical Internet logistics models, where real-world constraints cause network imbalances leading to starvation or overstocking, and proposes solutions to address this.
This paper deals with the concept of a 'Physical Internet', the idea of building large logistics systems like the very successful Digital Internet network. The idea is to handle mobile resources, such as containers, just like Internet data packets. Thus, it is possible to use the principles of encapsulation and routing to optimize the freight. The problem is that mobile resources, such as containers, are not quite similar to data packets, because they are real and not dematerialized. Thus the handling and the storing of mobile resources, such as containers, will create imbalances in the logistics network, leading to starvation or overstocking of logistic network nodes. We propose in this paper a study addressing this problem leading to some solutions.