Projects
Ongoing larger projects
FMaaS (ORC 2022-2029)
Principal Investigators: Dr. Stefano Fazi and Prof. dr. Jafar Rezaei (TU Delft)
The goal of project FMaaS (Freight Mobility as a Service) is to conceive an effective and sustainable digital matching platform for composite services, combining offerings from multiple, independent service providers, analyse its consequences, and understand the conditions under which such platforms are accepted and used, and provide environmental and societal benefits. FMaaS aims for:
- Making the transport chain more efficient and resilient, able to reduce waste, react swiftly to disruption and to adopt cohesively synchronized transport solutions that may prevent stagnation and the appearance of bottlenecks;
- Favouring the transition to a disintermediated and fair marketplace where the offer of transport solutions is transparent and in line with ethical principles;
- Limiting or even putting an end to the expansion of logistics infrastructures; and
- Lowering the impact of carbon emissions by favouring the emergence of a lean system based on no-waste principles and economies of scale.
More information (NWO) >>>
More information (TU Delft) >>>
PrimaVera (ORC 2018-2026)
Principal Investigator: Prof. dr. Marielle Stoelinga (University of Twente)
No more train delays, power outages, or failure of production machines? Project PrimaVera (Predictive maintenance for Very effective asset management), funded by the Dutch National Research Agenda (NWA), represents a major step towards this goal. With predictive maintenance, or just-in-time maintenance (maintenance just before a system breaks down), the reliability of infrastructure and production resources can be increased and the costs of maintenance can be reduced.
Existing predictive maintenance techniques only work for small-scale systems and are difficult to scale up. Choices made in one place in the chain have an important influence on other processes in the chain. The choice of a certain type of sensors and measurements influences the type of predictions that can be made, and therefore also the quality of the predictions. That is why cross-level optimization methods are being developed within PrimaVera.
More information (NWO) >>>
More information (project website) >>>
Ongoing smaller projects
Balancing Priorities: A Stakeholder-Centric Approach to Integrated Passenger and Freight Transport - Dr. M. Saeednia (Delft University)
Het integreren van vracht en personenvervoer wordt gezien als een veelbelovend antwoord op de toenemende vraag naar duurzaam en efficiënt transport. Deze combinatie kan het gebruik van de beschikbare middelen (zoals personeel en voertuigen) optimaliseren, de druk op het verkeer reduceren en de invloed van transport op het milieu verbeteren. Ondanks deze voordelen blijven praktische toepassingen hiervan tot nu toe uit, vooral door de segregatie tussen de twee sectoren. Dit project streeft ernaar een geïntegreerd systeem te ontwikkelen waarbij de prioriteiten van alle belanghebbenden op een gepaste manier worden meegenomen.
Lees het interview met Mahnam Saeednia over haar ontvangen subsidie >>>
TRUST - toward a TRUly Sustainable Transportation system - Prof. dr. D.F. Ettema (Utrecht University)
TRUST ontwikkelt bouwstenen om te komen tot een rechtvaardig en duurzaam transport systeem, omdat maatregelen die hiervoor nodig zijn voor verschillende groepen verschillend uitpakken. We ontwikkelen een ethisch raamwerk dat de uitkomsten van beleid beschrijft op basis van verschillende concepten van rechtvaardigheid. Vervolgens onderzoeken we hoe mensen over deze uitkomsten en rechtvaardigheid denken door middel van een enquête. Tenslotte onderzoeken we hoe interacties in het transport systeem (bijv. tussen personen en goederenvervoer) de rechtvaardigheid van beleid gericht op duurzaam transport beïnvloeden. Via co-creatie met stakeholders doen we op basis van bovenstaande voorstellen voor duurzaam en rechtvaardig transportbeleid.
Lees het interview met Dick Ettema over zijn ontvangen subsidie >>>
Completed projects
Spatial needs for storage in the Netherlands – a supply chain perspective - Dr. Frans Cruijsen (Tilburg University)
In the Netherlands, a public debate has grown around the big box warehouses built on new, greenfield locations in the countryside and suburban space. As the continued growth of e-commerce demand and ever-shorter expected delivery times have moved inventories closer to consumers, the visibility of such warehouses by urban and suburban residents has increased. While, historically, inventories are viewed primarily from the perspective of tying up working capital, increasingly, inventories also cause challenges in terms of tying up scarce public space, especially in areas with a high concentration of logistics activity. Globally, inventories have been increasing relative to sales. This is presumed to be caused by multiple developments. First, the globalization of supply chains has led to longer lead times and to increased uncertainty in supply, warranting larger inventories. Second, a global supply chain typically entails a larger number of manufacturing and transshipment locations, driving up inventory needs. The long period of historically low interest in the 2010s has also made it cheaper to tie up capital in inventory. Finally, at the tail end of the supply chain, online e-commerce with home delivery has grown considerably, creating a second retail channel in addition to traditional stores with associated inventory holdings. The drive toward faster home delivery has further exacerbated the number of e-commerce inventory locations.
CURSOR – Connecting URban Strategy and ORANGE - Prof. dr. E.T. Verhoef (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
The CURSOR project (2022-2024) has supported Vrije Universiteit and TNO in collaborating on the development of a spatial general equilibrium model for The Netherlands, ORANGE-US, that combines a thoroughly updated version of VU's earlier ORANGE model (a spatial general equilibrium model with endogenous labour supply and agglomeration effects) with TNO's Urban Strategies model (a detailed multi-modal traffic network model). Compared to the earlier ORANGE model, we have made many additions: we incorporated the remaining zones of the country, added soft transport modes (bikes and walking), we distinguished between types of cars (ICE, hybrid and electric), we made the utility specification more flexible, recalibrated the road congestion function, and added externalities such as agglomeration economies and pollution. We have also established a fully functional soft-link connection with Urban Strategies. The models have been used to analyze the effects of autonomous cars in the Netherlands and the imposition of zero-emission zones in Amsterdam.
Cobot Order Picking Strategies - Prof. dr. R. de Koster (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
In a human-robot collaborative pick environment, robots work alongside pickers to improve the pick efficiency by reducing the pickers’ unproductive walking time. However, the optimal picker deployment strategy – pooling pickers across all zones (parallel) or dedicating pickers to a warehouse zone (sequential) – is not clear. In this research, we compare two picker strategies, parallel and sequential, using dynamic models. First, we develop queuing network models to obtain load-dependent pick throughput rates corresponding to a fixed number of AGVs and picker deployment strategy. Then, we develop a Markov-decision model to investigate how higher pick performance can be achieved with fixed AGV resources and a dynamic pick strategy. Our results indicate that switching between picker allocation strategies can substantially reduce the overall system costs by 14%.
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