ABSTRACT. A transformational shift towards decarbonizing the freight and logistics sector is needed to reduce emissions within the 1.5-2ºC scenario of the Paris Climate Agreement. Leading companies believe that a more efficient freight and logistics sector goes hand in hand with greater competitiveness and environmental sustainability.  As customers of freight, multinational companies can drive change at scale due to their extensive logistics supply chains. Smart Freight Leaders inspire others and set the norm for industry as they

• Calculate and report credible emissions
• Set ambitious emission-reduction targets and KPIs
• Take business decisions and actions to improve performance
• Collaborate with logistics partners and leaders across the logistics supply chain
• Advocate for a long-term strategy and public policy towards decarbonization

Sophie Punte will explain the journey along the five central elements that define leadership. Examples from multinational companies will illustrate how leadership is put into practice and the benefits it brings to companies. The role of big data and the physical internet to make decarbonization possible will be highlighted.

ABSTRACT. If we speak about future logistics, such as the physical internet, how do we face our future in terms of human capital? In this keynote, we will meet with the company Container Service C. Groenenboom, a million dollar revenue company which repairs both old waste containers and reefers. Kristel Groenenboom will show you her story about human capital: the power of diversity in logistics in terms of gender, background of people, ages of employees and will tell you her experiences of being an entrepreneur in the world of logistics. She started at the age of 23 as CEO of this family business.  Since that time she has won a number of prizes and awards, such as a position in The Next Woman Top 100 for several years and the International Female Entrepreneur of the Year award.

BIOGRAPHY. At the age of 23, Kristel Groenenboom (1986, Rotterdam) took over her father’s company, Container Service C. Groenenboom. The company, located in Oosterhout, manufactures and repairs containers and employs around thirty employees. Groenenboom was trained as a commercial engineer at the University of Antwerp. She writes columns for the business website MT. In November last year she published her book: May I speak to Mr Kristel, please?

ABSTRACT. This short presentation first introduces the key Physical Internet (PI) concepts and foundations, highlighting them with practical examples. Then it focuses on cyber safety threats and challenges of PI enabled hyperconnected logistics and supply chains, and how to exploit PI properties to overcome them.

BIOGRAPHY. Benoit Montreuil is Professor and Coca-Cola Chair in Material Handling & Distribution at the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering of Georgia Tech. He is Director of Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary Supply Chain & Logistics Institute and Director of the Physical Internet Center. Dr. Montreuil is a world-renowned paradigm-challenging scientist, deeply vested in engaging with academic, industry and government leaders worldwide into research and innovation projects on smart, hyperconnected and sustainable logistics, supply chains, transportation, businesses and regions. He notably leads the. He is leading the International Physical Internet Initiative and he is on the scientific board of the Global Supply Chain Innovation Center. He has received numerous awards, recently including DC Velocity’s Rainmaker of the Year and The Physical Internet Pioneer Award for his outstanding and inspiring vision.

ABSTRACT. During this talk, Dirk Zittersteyn will go into some of the design decisions that were made in the early days of the internet, and the various shortcomings and vulnerabilities that were subsequently discovered, exploited and patched. These examples will serve to show how hard it is to implement security as an "add-on", and illustrate the importance of using secure design principles from day one.

BIOGRAPHY. Dirk Zittersteyn is an alumnus of the University of Groningen's Computing Science programme, and now helps HackerOne make the internet safer. As an engineer at HackerOne, Dirk is intimately familiar with the patchwork of security measures that help prevent malicious actors from compromising or crippling our internet infrastructure.

ABSTRACT. Research in the physical internet and related fields tends to focus on development of business models, IT architecture, optimisation rules, etc. The role of 'soft issues' like trust, change management, human-machine interface and the use of new solutions are underexposed. We try to discover the role of human behaviour in the development of the Physical Internet concept. This presentation starts the discussion by addressing several aspects where the role of human behaviour is evident and also shows some examples of research which do include human aspects. We will explore and discuss in this session the power of collaboration, the role of interdisciplinary research and the impact of the Physical Internet on human capital and organisations in the logistics sector.

ABSTRACT. Interaction between the Physical Internet and human actions is being controlled by a diversity of communication channels. The action itself is important but perhaps even more important is the communication that triggers the action. We need to better grasp this relationship in order understand the Human-PI interface. This presentation provides insights from the perspective of Learning History, a long standing field of research. Related to the Physical Internet we address the ability of learning organisation within the PI. Based on the barrieres that exist in the development of the PI and for instance ICT adoption project, it will show that we need to understand the mental models of people first in order to realise the required change. 

ABSTRACT. The long-term Physical Internet (PI) vision assumes that all logistics will be self-organizing, shippers and receivers are connected via PI and routing on this network as well as handling of assignments are standardized and optimized. Although this PI vision is appealing, academically as well as for logistics industry, many logistics practitioners have difficulty to see the short term implications or opportunities arising from realizing (the first steps) of this PI vision. This contribution aims at bridging the gap between the long term PI vision and its short term implications for logistics practitioners, by showing how and where a more self-organizing logistics (SOL) system (see for example Pan et al. 2017) can have benefits in the daily logistics operations at this moment.

ABSTRACT. To face crisis and market instability in a complex, polymorphic and competitive context, enterprises need a shift in perspective: from a “company-centric” logic, in which production efficiencies are the highest priority, to a “customer-centric” one, wherein the structure and behaviour of the whole enterprise cannot neglect consideration of full knowledge of the various customer segments with which it interacts. The recent 4.0 paths that many companies have started to follow allow them to leverage availability, punctuality, promptness and flexibility. These are indispensable factors in satisfying and retaining demanding clients with higher expectations in terms of service quality (Ayres, 2010) and thus ensuring success. This research focuses on the key and central role of logistics and supply chain management (SCM) today (Lee et al., 2016; Partida, 2017) and the importance of having professionals with specific professional/technical skills and an adequate educational background.

ABSTRACT. The goal of AEOLIX is to overcome today’s fragmentation and lack of connectivity around ICT-based systems for logistics decision making. Despite the recent investments in ERP, TMS and Port community systems, information gaps remain due to the disparate and passive nature of data. Each logistics player is currently required to log into each system separately to look for information or manually insert data into different formats. AEOLIX is developing a cloud-based, multi-enterprise “many-to-many” network which captures and streams data in real-time, and automatically translates “data format” from different IT systems giving companies the ability to rapidly respond to issues through a customised dashboard.

ABSTRACT. The forwarders’ market needs visibility, efficient & sustainable use of resources and resilience. Small actors need to organize themselves into global coalitions to compete with big players and new entrants. Logit One’s SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform is uniquely positioned through its combination of rich consolidated data, synchromodal planning, agile networks of forwarders, and a step towards automatic process execution. These services have been developed together with launching customers which are leaders in their respective fields.

BIOGRAPHY. Frank Knoors is the managing director of Logit One. He has been working extensively in the field of business process re-engineering and e-commerce - implementing new distribution channels and new forms of collaboration, predominantly in transport and logistics.

ABSTRACT. In recent years, the computational support in planning supply chain processes significantly increased. E.g., a multitude of computer aided planning tools for dispatchers emerged. This is, on the one hand, very welcome as the complexity of the planning tasks steadily increases meaning that human capability of overlooking the whole process reaches its limits. On the other hand, this development bears some pitfalls. E.g., even if a computer aided system is designed in such a way that the final decision will be taken by a human, the decision process will be heavily guided by the decision support tool. If the tool itself has conceptional flaws it is therefore very likely that these are adopted during the final decision process. It is therefore essential that (at least) the very fundamental parts of such a decision support tool are reliable and apply the very last state of knowledge. Although the concept of the Physical Internet (PI) is rather widespread in many disciplines, one essential building block is (sustainable) transportation and therefore plain routing, i.e., path finding in a multimodal transportation network.

ABSTRACT. Introduction of topic and panelists by Sophie Punte.

BIOGRAPHY. Sophie Punte is the Executive Director of the Smart Freight Centre, a mission-driven organization for a more efficient and environmentally sustainable global logistics sector. She played a lead role in the development of a global method for emissions measurement together with the industry-backed Global Logistics Emissions Council (GLEC). She is also the chair on sustainability of the ALICE platform for logistics research and innovation. Sophie previously worked at Clean Air Asia, the United Nations and KPMG on environmental management and corporate sustainability. She has a master’s degree in environmental management.

ABSTRACT. For more than 15 years, Bill has been focused on the transportation sector and specifically, the auto carrier industry. A visionary problem solver, Bill founded CTM WW and developed the equipment and methods necessary to capture a major opportunity and solve a significant global problem for this industry. In addition to bringing a broad range of experience to CTM WW, including recruiting and negotiating with multi-national suppliers, managing various patent processes, founding overseas subsidiaries, raising capital and successfully bringing the enterprise to its current state of readiness.

ABSTRACT. Leon Simons has 15 years of experience in logistics, working for shippers, carriers and LSPs. He led sustainability efforts at Moonen Packaging as one of the first member of the Lean & Green program in The Netherlands. In 2016, he started working as Project Manager Analytics with Connekt to further develop the Lean & Green program and tooling for CO2 calculation and allocation.

ABSTRACT. Eszter is Industry Relations Manager at Smart Freight Centre. She engages with companies to understand their needs to decarbonize their global logistics supply chains, inform them of SFC’s services, and manages projects and collaboration efforts with companies. Before joining SFC, Eszter worked with an international chemical distribution company and a consulting firm on quality and sustainability management, carbon foot-printing and green labelling. Eszter holds a Bachelor’s in Economics and International Trade (Budapest) and an MSc in Environment and Resource Management (Amsterdam).

ABSTRACT. Dr. Igor Davydenko is advisor in the field of freight transport and logistics with 10+ year experience in quantitative freight and logistics modeling, company logistics network and process optimization, environmental impact of transport and logistics activities, innovation in information exchange and logistics visibility, government policy analysis. The emphasis of the work is on an achievement of clarity in complex settings, wherever possible quantifying the outcomes.

ABSTRACT. Inspired from the digital internet, the Physical Internet (PI) is defined as a global standardized and interconnected logistics system. This paper studies the Road-Rail assignment problem which consists on assigning inbound trucks to the PI-docks and assigning the unloaded PI-containers to the train’s wagons. A mixed integer linear programming mathematical model (MILP) is proposed with the objective to minimize both the number of used wagons and the internal travel distance by the PI-containers from the PI-docks to the wagons. Moreover, a heuristic is proposed for generating an initial solution and a tabu search meta-heuristic is used after to find better solutions. Finally, the proposed methods are tested on an illustrative example and the obtained results are presented.

ABSTRACT. Nowadays, the urgent need for sustainable development is imposing radical changes in how to design, produce and distribute the right product, in the right place, at the right time and at the right price. A new paradigm named "Physical internet" has been presented as worldwide open interconnected logistics system to make the current logistical systems more flexible and sustainable. This paper addresses the inventory management in the classical supply chain and the Physical Internet supply chain networks while considering possible perturbations during the delivery of goods between the hubs. We consider a supply chain network configuration from the literature. Two simulation models are proposed to test both the classical supply chain network and the Physical Internet supply chain under perturbations. Three scenarios are considered by varying delivery delays, retailers’ demands and the number of trucks for the two simulation models. Several key performance indicators (KPIs) are considered, such as resources usage, transportation cost, storage cost and delivery delays.

ABSTRACT. Inventory control policy is crucial in a supply chain management, since it affects the performance of whole supply chain significantly. Recent advances has changed the order profile towards more product variety with less volume and decreased response time (e.g. same day delivery, etc.). This issue has created more variability in orders throughout the supply chain. Hence, management of inventory became a critical subject in a supply chain to alter this variability and increase the performance of the supply chain. This paper investigates an (s, S) inventory control model using the benefits of the Physical Internet that provides lateral transshipment between the intermediate hub locations. As a result of this study, it is observed that the performance of a lateral transshipment policy strongly depends on the studied network design and its parameter values as well as how the transshipment policies are pre-defined.

ABSTRACT. A key pillar in the Physical Internet is the premise of collaboration among different companies. However, many horizontal logistics collaborations have ended due to mistrust about the fairness of applied gain share rules. Plenty of different rules have been designed and used in practice, all with their own advantages and disadvantages. We experienced that companies are not willing to adopt more mathematically complex gain sharing rules such as the Shapley Value, which is easy manageable in a 2-company collaboration but becomes abstract and hard to implement the moment more than 2 companies collaborate. At the same time, the existing easier methodologies (e.g. volume-based cost allocation rules) may lead to a feeling of unfairness for one of the parties – reducing the trust in the collaboration, often leading to the collaboration being terminated. We propose a Linear Rule methodology for sharing the gains in a collaborative network: it looks at what the cost are that each partner has/would have had for the volume in the new collaboration, and sums this pre-collaboration cost for all partners. Based on each companies share in the total pre-collaboration cost (% of the total), a division key is created that can be applied to the post-collaboration cost.

ABSTRACT. Physical Internet (PI) is a solution to the global logistics challenge and its objective is to improve the economic, environmental and social efficiency and sustainability of the way physical objects are moved, stored, realized, supplied and used across the world (Montreuil, Meller et al. 2013). This concept proposes to interconnect logistics services on a global scale, via gathering transportation systems (trucks, railroads, etc.), facilities (warehouses, hubs, etc.) and information systems (ERP, TMS, WMS, etc.) to supply or distribute freight from shippers to their clients (Montreuil, Ballot et al. 2012). As said in Montreuil, Meller et al. (2010), the deployment of such a network will inevitably lead to a profound reorganization of transportation and logistics networks and resources; and it will also have huge impact on the way companies will value the transportation, storage and supply of goods. The PI is about networks of networks aiming to shift from a fragmented hard-to-optimize organization to an open and decentralized organization allowing actors to share resources for more efficiency. Different from centralized horizontal logistics collaboration that supports the collaborative supply chain, the decentralization by PI supports companies in both collaborative and competitive supply chains. It enables real time and decentralized transportation decisions (procurement, consolidation, optimization, etc.) from companies within the network. To ensure efficiency, the key issue is to guide the companies’ individual decisions toward global optimality of the PI. According to the literature, Mechanism design theory is the most applied approach to investigate the problem (Narahari, Garg et al. 2009). Following the approach, our research work aims to set up and develop new mechanisms, rules and strategies to enable better resources utilization and guide agents to better value transportation services in PI.

ABSTRACT. Current logistics paradigm has been practiced for decades. A new game changing logistic system named the Physical Internet (π) is proposed to shape the structure of supply chains. π aims to universally interconnect logistics networks in order to increase the efficiency and sustainability of logistics processes. However, this development requires the participation of different key logistics players. Different players, including researchers from academia, industry and government, have made contributions towards the challenging task of π realisation. ETP-Alice is a European initiative set up to develop a comprehensive strategic roadmap for the adoption of the Physical Internet. However, the effective adoption of this system requires, partially but fundamentally, a consensus by all π stakeholders on the credibility of the big picture this system is proposing, which is the optimisation of the overall logistics practice. In this paper, the purpose is to conduct a stakeholders mapping of the Physical Internet using systems thinking approach, analyse role and motivations of each stakeholder, and present a rich picture of π stockholders. The rich picture will help build synergies between policy makers and industry with the main aim of adopting π and encourage more researchers, logistics practitioners and policy makers to join the game.

ABSTRACT. This paper describes the urban transport of goods, which will also increase steadily in the future due to the continual growth of the e-commerce sector. The focus is on the last-mile distribution of packages from the city hubs of the Physical Internet, which are located in the periphery of large cities, to the center. Our vision is one of underground tubes, in which electrically driven transport capsules move goods that are stored in pi-boxes. We have named this vison of tubular networks, a logistics pipeline, LogiPipe. This method of inner-city freight transport offers a number of significant advantages. On the one hand, delivery traffic and costs are greatly reduced and accordingly harmful emissions such as noise and fine dust. On the other hand, less valuable open spaces (e.g., for parking lots or loading zones) will be sacrificed. As a result, the potential for environmental damage is reduced and people's well-being can be increased.

ABSTRACT. In support of the trend towards ever more complex supply chain collaboration for the Physical Internet, a trusted, multi-tenant (and interoperable) data sharing infrastructure has to be enabled. Trust is a condition sine qua non organizations may not be prepared to share potentially competitive sensitive information. As such, trust has to be an essential design aspect for any multi-tenant data sharing infrastructure, in which the combination of both procedural risk mitigation measures (e.g. contract / agreement frameworks, certification/attestation, accountability/logging, …) and technical risk mitigation measures (data sovereignty, encryption/PKI technology, containerization / sandboxing, blockchain,, …) are perceived to be sufficient for the data sharing stakeholders To overcome these challenges for trusted data sharing, various reference architectures for a trusted, multi-tenant, data sharing infrastructure are being developed. As such, the Industrial Data Space (IDS) initiative is currently gaining much attention. It is based on the architectural principles of keeping the data owner in control over his data and keeping data, data processing and data distribution at the source. Moreover, its reference architecture is strongly grounded on a role / stakeholder model for the intermediary trusted roles to enable peer-to-peer data sharing over a controlled and trusted connector infrastructure. Although the sharing of the actual transactional data in the reference architecture is peer-to-peer without the need for centrally storing or processing the data, the intermediary trusted roles may contain and process meta-data on the data sources, the data transactions and/or on the identities of the parties involved in the data sharing. As such, these intermediate supporting roles and should be implemented by trusted parties. Hence, these supporting roles may provide vulnerabilities in the overarching trust architecture for which trustworthy implementation alternatives should be evaluated. This paper focuses on the role of blockchain technology for improving trust levels for such intermediary trusted roles.

ABSTRACT. In the past months, 130 pupils at primary and secondary schools worked with students of the University of Groningen. They explored the Physical internet concept, they discovered the world of city logistics and came up with innovative solutions. During this event, we will meet Benjamin Derksen, CEO of Frank: a large webshop company in the Netherlands. Benjamin will reflect on e-commerce logistics & operations and we will show footage of the children board meeting with Benjamin and our young explorers!

ABSTRACT. Manon Ossevoort has set one of the most bizarre, and rather extreme World records: she’s the first woman to travel all the way to the South Pole… by tractor. Over 38.000 kilometers she’s covered from the Netherlands and through the most divers countries and landscapes. With her ‘Tractor Girl’ project the Dutch actress and theatre-maker wanted to create a real (and real-life) adventure story about having dreams, and more important, about doing them!

On the 9th of December, 9 years after starting, Manon arrived with her tractor at the geographic South Pole. An emotional and magical moment. Impressions and stories of this epic adventure can be found on this website.

Manon tells her story from the early stages of ‘having a dream’ and starting to plan pragmatically (but never having done anything special like organizing a bingo), up to bouncing through the dessert on her tractor, and being followed by the World’s media.

She likes to share with her audience the funny and often hopeful stories she experienced on her way through Europe, the Balkans, Africa and on Antarctica. For over four years Manon filmed portraits of inspiring people and initiatives while traveling, and she filmed herself on her tractor-journey. This film-footage is now being turned into a documentary movie. Her (interactive) talks show a large range of these beautiful images and stories.