The in.west System

Utilize capacities in a better way and reducing the freight traffic on road and rail — these are the goal of in.west or "Intelligente Wechselbrücksteuerung" in full, a joint research project of DHL Solutions Fashion GmbH, Deutsche Post AG, Micromata, BIBA — Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, and OHB Teledata funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. More specific, in.west tries to decrease the traffic in the area of goods and freight of postage and mailing, to increase the planning security for combined traffic, and utilizing transport units more efficiently. This leads to both, a reduction of CO₂ emission and higher profits for the logistics companies. The research project deals with the control of swap bodies (standardized containers with special appliances for exchange between trucks and trains). The stated goals are reached by employing innovative logistic information, planning, and control techniques, such as mobile sensor nodes for swap body location and evolutionary algorithms for route planning.

Publications

1. Thomas Weise, Alexander Podlich, Christian Gorld: Solving Real-World Vehicle Routing Problems with Evolutionary Algorithms, Raymond Chiong and Sandeep Dhakal, eds, Natural Intelligence for Scheduling, Planning and Packing Problems, Studies in Computational Intelligence volume 250/2009, pp. 29—53
2. Thomas Weise, Alexander Podlich, Manfred Menze, Christian Gorldt: Optimierte Güterverkehrsplanung mit Evolutionären Algorithmen, Industrie Management, volume 25, number 3, pp. 37—40
3. Thomas Weise, Alexander Podlich, Kai Reinhard, Christian Gorld, Kurt Geihs: Evolutionary Freight Transportation Planning, EvoTRANSLOG: 3rd European Workshop on Evolutionary Computation in Transportation and Logistics, ed. Andreas Fink and Franz Rothlauf, Springer
4. Alexander Podlich, Thomas Weise, Manfred Menze, Christian Gorld: Intelligente Wechselbrückensteuerung für die Logistik von Morgen, First Workshop on Global Sensor Networks (GSN'09), ed. Michal Wagner and Dieter Hogrefe and Kurt Geihs and Klaus David, The European Association of Software Science and Technology
5. Alexander Podlich: Intelligente Planung und Optimierung des Güterverkehrs auf Straße und Schiene mit evolutionären Algorithmen, master's thesis, 2009

Videos

There exists a promotion video for the in.west project which also outlines the application of evolutionary algorithms. This video is available either with music only or with music and a speaker in German language. All videos are copyrighted 2009 by the Micromata and must not be re-distributed or used in any way without the Micromata's explicit written aggreement.

Video without Comments

Video with German Comments