Chair / Professorship forTechnology and Operations Management

Sustainable Supply Chain Management

Shifting freight from fast (e.g., air, road) to slow (e.g., rail, waterway) transport modes can substantially improve the economic and environmental performance of logistics systems. Regrettably, even with technology and regulations developing over the last few decades, modal shifts have remained modest at best.

We argue that this is partly the result of a failure to take a holistic supply chain view of the transportation decisions, By jointly optimizing the entire supply chain including transportation, inventory management, production, etc., we can move from a “local optima” to a relatively “global optima”, and reduce cost and emissions at the same time.

Supply Chain Digitalization

Facing various challenges in sustainably and digitalization, we will most likely be even more dependent on the support from various technologies in the coming future.

Over the years, related research in this field is rich. When the keyword “technology AND transportation” is inserted into Google Scholar, more than three million articles can be found. But the question is, what are the major emerging technologies in the field of supply chain management, and how will they impact firms’ operations?

We have proposed a novel approach to combine the perspectives from academia, industry, as well as government, and converge to commonly-acknowledged emerging technologies. After that, we analyse their impact on supply chain management and discuss future research opportunities.

Physical Internet

How will tomorrow’s logistics network look like? Will it be able to tackle the economic (e.g., profitability), social (e.g., congestions), and environmental (e.g., carbon emissions) sustainability challenges?

The Physical Internet (PI) is regarded as a paradigm-breaking concept to tackle the sustainability challenge. The concept originates from its metaphor, the Digital Internet (DI): Whereas the Digital Internet transfers digital data smoothly among users, the Physical Internet moves physical objects seamlessly through an open and interconnected logistics network.

Despite a novel concept, the research in PI is in an early stage. We aim to contribute to the PI research by developing quantitative logistics models to support its theory building and practical implementation.