Thematic sessions

The emergence of intermodal freight transportation which involves different actors in a single transportation chain provides cheaper, faster and safer transport of cargo all over the world. With these merits, intermodal freight transportation has witnessed a drastic growth in the last decades and this trend is expected to continue. In a broad sense, the intermodal freight transportation consists of organizing the transport of goods in standardized loading units called Intermodal Transport Units or ITUs (containers, swap bodies, etc.) by using at least two transportation modes (rail, road, and water) in a single transportation chain.

In this context, several variants of core problems such as vehicle routing, drayage operations, and intermodal freight transportation remain formidably challenging to solve for the operations research community and, for most of them, efficient solutions are still sought after by the industrials. One of the recent researches trends explore the possibility of combining optimization and simulation in innovative ways to improve the quality of the proposed solutions. Simulation and optimization can be applied iteratively or in an integrated fashion.

Our session focuses on the development of innovative solution methods that combine simulation and optimization to efficiently solve vehicle routing, drayage, and intermodal freight transportation problems. The proposed optimization approaches can be exact or heuristic.

The goal of the Special Session is to understand how synchromodality can be appropriately implemented in practice and to what degree it can improve the supply chain performance and service quality, particularly in the presence of uncertainty and disruption. Interest in synchromodality however only emerged recently and synchromodality is still complex to implement in real life situations. Wider acceptance and corroboration of the construct call for real life applications that are acutely lacking just now. This session will discuss key enablers for synchromodality, such as, close cooperation between stakeholders at different levels, awareness and mental shift, sufficient technical infrastructure ICT/ITS, sophisticated planning systems, attractive utilization of physical infrastructure.

This special session is clearly multi-disciplinary as it mixes at various levels knowledge in management (costs, decision making, governance, public management, stakeholders), mathematics and modelling as well as computer science (synchromodal platform)

This special session aims at identifying crucial research progress in Synchromodality Transport Systems. Scientists, researchers and engineers are invited to submit their current research related with Synchromodality: recent developments in theory, computational studies, optimization, information systems, simulation.

"Smart process management" stands for process that integrate digital technology. This is not the future but our present. Our everyday life is more and more experiencing and adopting new devices/things that have computation capabilities that can provide us with smart and/or intelligent support. This is the case for almost all the different scenarios for human societies. One of such scenarios is the transport and logistics field.

The motivation behind “Smart process management” is to develop process management featuring higher agility, configurability, robustness and responsiveness while also ensuring the maintainability and sustainability of the processes, service and/or product.

The smart and/or intelligent support for achieving systems with these ambitious objectives is coming from the computation capabilities that the devices/things in the process environment provide.

The purpose of this special session is to bring together the researchers from smart process management as well as transport and logistics sciences to set up visions on how state-of-art digital technology techniques and computational intelligence can be and are used for solving transport and logistics scheduling problems, and how transport and logistics scientists can contribute in promoting new applications with computational intelligence.

The hospital and pharmaceutical systems has become a great challenge for many countries due to the, increasing of population density and the increasing of healthcare complexity of service systems. So, these systems are daily confronted with many problems related to organization and planning. Indeed, Hospital staff, pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers have a common objective which is: serve the patient with the right product, in the right place, at the right time and in the best conditions. This necessitates the use of techniques of modeling, simulation and optimization of processes. This session aims to share the different works of the researchers in this axis, especially researchs dealing with the static and stochastic (under uncertainty) aspect of the problems such as: drug distribution, drug storage, Resource planning, waste collection and recycling, patient flow from the emergency department to hospital inpatient zones…

The supply chain is now global and complex. From the origin of raw materials to the final consumer, the supply chain must promote best practices in terms of optimizing distribution networks, quality control throughout the supply chain, performance monitoring, consolidation, etc.

For this, the supply chain requires the use of numerous information that circulates between several partners and collaborators in real time. So continuous and secure access to key information that allows rapid and appropriate decision-making appears to be an essential asset for supply chain management.

In addition, with clients increasingly aware of environmental concerns and sustainable development, the supply chain must take into consideration the environmental and social problems present in their supply chain by promoting the development of reverse and green logistics.

Recently, operation research methods and optimization became a primordial field for the operations management in container terminals (CTs). Indeed, the fierce competitive environment and the constraint exercised by ship-owners for high effectiveness of service (berthing and vessel loading/unloading operations) require the optimal planning of seaside operations planning which include berth Allocation, Quay Crane Assignment and quay Crane scheduling. In this context, the researches focus their attention to attain these objectives by developing new frameworks and mathematical strategies such as modeling, simulation, heuristic, meta- heuristic, etc.

The aim of this session is to give an opportunity for researchers and industrialists to sharing their knowledge and results in the field of optimization of seaside operation planning in container terminals.

In recent years, the Vehicle Routing Problem with Delivery and Pickup (VRPDP) and its variants, which consist of a study field closely related to the reverse logistics, have grown ever more popular in the academic literature.

This session is dedicated to the study of the General Pickup and Delivery Problem (GPDP) and its different variants, including the two classes:

• VRPPD : Pickup and Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem, comprises situations where goods are transported between pickup and delivery locations,
• VRPB : Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls, refers to problems where all goods that will be delivered to customers must be loaded at the depot as well as the goods collected from customers must be returned to the depot.

The class VRPB is subdivided into four important subclasses that affect the structure of routes:

• Vehicle Routing Problem with Clustered Backhauls (VRPCB): all delivery customers must be served before the first pickup customer.
• Vehicle Routing Problem with Mixed Backhauls (VRPMB): clustering restriction is not considered, so Mixed visiting sequences are explicitly allowed
• Vehicle Routing Problem with Divisible Delivery and Pickup (VRPDDP): each customer can be visited more than once.
• Vehicle Routing Problem with Simultaneous Delivery and Pickup (VRPSDP): each customer can be visited only once, so delivery and pickup are done simultaneously.

The GPDP problem can be enriched by specific practical constraints. In particular, the company may serve a fleet of identical or heterogeneous vehicles from one or more depots; customers may need slots for pickup and delivery; etc.

The purpose of this session is to present the new trends in solving these types of problems, in terms of modeling and / or resolution methods, for both exact and approximate methods. Contributions based on case studies of real applications are encouraged.

In recent years, in the context of very strong international competition, ports have had to begin to modernize, notably by integrating more and more new information and communication technologies. Thus, research work integrating in particular connected objects, the Internet of Things and the Blockchain were born and gave birth to the notion of Smart Port. The use of the Blockchain for ports of the future seems very promising because it allows to introduce confidence in an environment where the actors are very numerous and do not trust each other for reasons of competition. For example, within the same port, we have many stakeholders for the delivery of goods. In some cases, it is necessary both to monitor the transport of goods but also not to disclose this information to the entire community for competitive security and/or reasons. The blockchain can offer both traceability, information reliability and security. There are many scientific barriers to implementing these solutions: the management of consents for data access, scaling up, consensus methods to allow sufficient transactions at a reasonable cost, and so on.