Sunshine/AdobestockWhen goods are delivered from A to B, a significant part of the journey involves transporting shipments between warehouses, hub facilities and distribution centres. A research team working on the COMMIT project, which is funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, is developing technologies to prevent vehicles from travelling this ‘middle mile’ empty or with low load utilisation. The project is co-located at the University of Vienna and the University of Klagenfurt.

“Transportation is one of the world’s largest industry sectors and a major contributor to global CO2 emissions. If we succeed in making it more efficient, costs will be reduced and the environmental impact will be lower”, states Margaretha Gansterer (Department of Operations, Energy and Environmental Management), head of the COMMIT project at the University of Klagenfurt.
The project focuses on the so-called ‘middle mile’, i.e. transporting goods between warehouses. Yannick Scherr, principle investigator at the University of Vienna (Department of Business Decisions and Analytics), explains: “Although logistics carriers use sophisticated optimisation technologies, many vehicles still travel the middle mile empty or with light loads.” For smaller companies in particular, it may even be impossible to avoid these empty trips. The team has identified one approach to a solution in the form of collaboration between logistics carriers, which – competition notwithstanding – could exchange transportation requests and information. “Collaboration has already shown benefits in other parts of the supply chain. COMMIT is the first project to comprehensively investigate collaborative middle-mile transportation”, Margaretha Gansterer specifies.
In a first step, researchers will design a collaboration platform by studying exchange mechanisms based on auctions. Next, the focus is on the decision-making of the collaborators on this platform. This involves solving challenging optimisation problems in the area of service network design. By integrating both perspectives, the collaboration potential in various planning scenarios is ultimately determined and examined to see how it can be enhanced as early as the creation of the initial tactical plan. To this end, the research team is developing algorithms that combine elements from mathematical programming, heuristics and mechanism design.
For practitioners in the transportation industry, the project will deliver managerial insights and tools to optimise collaboration and sharing of orders along the ‘middle mile’.
Der Beitrag Greater efficiency along the ‘middle mile’ in logistics as a result of collaboration between companies erschien zuerst auf University of Klagenfurt.