Optimization Approaches for the Physical Internet

With the Physical Internet (PI), a global economic transformation towards a more holistic consideration and collaboration of different agents is promoted. Its goal is the implementation of global sustainable logistics by increasing the utilization of available resources. This should be reached by developing a network in which goods of different organizations are transported, stored and handled. One aspect of the PI is the optimization of the transport procedure. In this paper, potential optimization models for a subset of three key elements of the PI, the containers, movers (all kinds of transportation means), and nodes (all kinds of locations), are presented. Moreover, corresponding algorithmic approaches are proposed. The novel modeling approach of optimization networks (ON) with the objective of finding an overall optimized solution considering the involved interrelated subtasks in a holistic sense is compared to highly reactive solution methods based on rules that are learned offline. With the proposed approaches, interoperability between different (economic) agents and (software) systems is supported. The goal of multidisciplinary collaboration of different participants and their integration into one PI network should be approached.