Papers

As the transportation modes and free trade agreements between countries evolves, the flow of goods increases all around the world. There is thus a pressure on the logistic web to optimize its design and management such to lower its cost and its impact on the environment. However, the efforts done individually by companies are far from sufficient to lower substantially the CO2 emissions and the cost involved along the logistics web. To cope with this, logistics web needs a major shift on the way physical objects are moved, stored, realized, supplied and used throughout the world. The Physical Internet initiative has been proposed by Montreuil (2011) to address this grand challenge. 

There are many factors that makes actual logistic web costly and inefficient. One of these factors is that the facilities realizing and storing the products are typically long to build and need a high investment. To address this challenge, this paper focuses on hyperconnected mobile modular production which is one of the concepts proposed in the Physical Internet scheme is the which focuses on the realization web interconnecting the way physical objects are realized (e.g. produced, made, assembled, finished, etc.). The modular concept can also be applied to storage of some of the finished goods in the distribution web. (stored closer to customers). These are two of the five components of the logistics web (Montreuil et al. 2013). The paper thus proposes a modeling approach that addresses the dynamic deployment of resources of the realization and the distribution webs while considering its link with the supply web and the customers demand through a production and an assembly process.

The approach exploits and enhances the well-known modular production concepts (Starr 1965, Tompkins et al. 2010) and builds on the recent process and technological innovations on mobile modular containerized production (Lier 2015) and labs (Shibomana 2015). Presented at the 2nd International Physical Internet Conference in 2015, the projects of Bayer and of Proctor and Gamble are developed under the modular production scheme (Kessler 2015, Lier et al. 2013, Lier et al. 2015, Shibomana 2015). Hyperconnected modular production exploits the dynamic deployment of (containerized) production modules in open facilities (fabs) across territories for enhanced flexibility and adaptability. The facilities are designed to ease the implementation, operation and relocation of the production modules.