The in.west Project

in.west is a multidisciplinary combination of different technologies to provide improved control of swap trailers and a more efficient scheduling of intermodal transport routes. The goals of the project were to utilize capacities in a better way and to reduce the freight traffic on road and rail. in.west or "Intelligente Wechselbrücksteuerung" in full, was a successful 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. in.west decreases the traffic in the area of goods and freight of postage and mailing, increases the planning security for combined traffic, and utilizes transport units more efficiently. This leads to both, a reduction of CO₂ emission and higher profits for the logistics companies.

The research project dealt 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 (EAs) for route planning. Prof. Dr. Weise provided external consultation services supporting the development of the EA-based logistic planning and optimization component used the in.west project, which also led to a set of high-quality scientific publications.

Publications

• Thomas Weise, Alexander Podlich, and Christian Gorldt. Solving Real-World Vehicle Routing Problems with Evolutionary Algorithms. In Raymond Chiong and Sandeep Dhakal, editors, Natural Intelligence for Scheduling, Planning and Packing Problems, volume 250 of Studies in Computational Intelligence, chapter 2, pages 29-53. ISBN: 978-3-642-04038-2, Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, October 2009.
  doi:10.1007/978-3-642-04039-9_2 / pdf

• Thomas Weise, Alexander Podlich, Manfred Menze, and Christian Gorldt. Optimierte Güterverkehrsplanung mit Evolutionären Algorithmen. Industrie Management – Zeitschrift für industrielle Geschäftsprozesse, 10(3):37-40, June 2009.

• Thomas Weise, Alexander Podlich, Kai Reinhard, Christian Gorldt, and Kurt Geihs. Evolutionary Freight Transportation Planning. In Mario Giacobini, Penousal Machado, Anthony Brabazon, Jon McCormack, Stefano Cagnoni, Michael O'Neill, Gianni A. Di Caro, Ferrante Neri, Anikó Ekárt, Mike Preuß, Anna Isabel Esparcia-Alcázar, Franz Rothlauf, Muddassar Farooq, Ernesto Tarantino, Andreas Fink, and Shengxiang Yang, editors, Applications of Evolutionary Computing – Proceedings of EvoWorkshops 2009: EvoCOMNET, EvoENVIRONMENT, EvoFIN, EvoGAMES, EvoHOT, EvoIASP, EvoINTERACTION, EvoMUSART, EvoNUM, EvoSTOC, EvoTRANSLOG (EvoWorkshops'09), volume 5484/2009 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), pages 768-777, Tübingen, Germany: Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Fakultät für Informations- und Kognitionswissenschaften, April 15–17, 2009. ISBN: 978-3-642-01128-3, Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag GmbH.
  doi:10.1007/978-3-642-01129-0_87 / pdf / slides
  Indexing: EI:20093012218527, WOS:000265786800087

• Alexander Podlich, Thomas Weise, Manfred Menze, and Christian Gorldt. Intelligente Wechselbrückensteuerung für die Logistik von Morgen. Electronic Communications of the EASST, 17(205):1-11, Special Issue: Michael Wagner, Dieter Hogrefe, Kurt Geihs, and Klaus David, editors, “Kommunikation in Verteilten Systemen 2009”, KiVS'09, Proceedings, Workshops der Wissenschaftlichen Konferenz Kommunikation in Verteilten Systemen 2009 (WowKiVS 2009), Kassel, Hesse, Germany: University of Kassel, Fachbereich 16: Elektrotechnik/Informatik, March 6, 2009. Potsdam, Germany: European Association of Software Science and Technology (EASST; Universität Potsdam, Institute for Informatics).
  doi:10.14279/tuj.eceasst.17.205

[german pdf 1] [german pdf 2]