Teodor Gabriel Crainic presents “Urban freight transportation and logistics”

Presented by the Smart Freight Centre Freight Leaders Series.

All are welcome to attend this free online webinar. If any specific accommodations are needed, please contact smartfreight@utoronto.ca as early as possible.

Please join us for Q & A following the presentation.

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Abstract

Urban freight transport stands for the movement of vehicles carrying goods into, out of, and within urban areas, and is a core component of the logistic activities performed in the city to answer the demand raised by the economic and social activities taking place within, e.g., supplying stores and places of work and leisure, delivering goods at homes, providing the means to get rid of refuse, and providing a vital link between firms and their suppliers and customers situated both within the city limits and elsewhere in the world. Efficient urban freight transport and logistics are thus major enabling factors for city life and development while, unfortunately, also being a major disturbing factor to urban life in terms of congestion, pollution, safety, and security.

New organization and business models known as City Logistics have emerged to address these issues, aiming to conciliate and jointly “optimize” the economic and social goals of sustainable urban transportation and logistics activities. City Logistics is often described as an integrated logistics system based on cooperation among stakeholders, resource sharing, consolidation, synchronization of operations, multi and intermodal transport, and the separation of commercial transactions generating goods movements from the planning and execution of the corresponding activities. Operations Research (OR) provides the methodology to design and deploy the advanced planning and management decision-support systems needed to account for the complexity of City Logistics, to address the associated challenges, and reach the goals of service, economic, and environmental efficiency.

While steadily growing during the last twenty-five years and yielding a broad and rich portfolio of concepts, models, and methods, there are still many City Logistics and OR methodological issues have been little addressed, if at all, which points to interesting research directions. Simultaneously, the society, the technology, and the economy evolve, challenging system planning and the science supporting it.- The seminar aims to present a synthesis of OR contributions to the supply side of City Logistics systems, discussing some recent results, identifying gaps in knowledge, and pointing to challenges and emerging topics.

About the speaker

Teodor Gabriel Crainic is Full Professor of Operations Research, Transportation, and Logistics, and holds the Chair on Intelligent Logistics and Transportation Systems Planning in the School of Management, Université du Québec à Montréal. He is also Adjunct Professor, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, Université de Montréal, and senior scientist at CIRRELT, the Interuniversity Research Center for Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation, where he is Director of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory.

Professor Crainic is a member of the Royal Society of Canada – The Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada. He co-founded, in 1991, the TRISTAN – TRienial Symposium on Transportation Analysis and, in 2000, the Odysseus – International Workshop on Freight Transportation and Logistics series of international meetings. He contributes to several editorial boards. He was President of the Transportation Science and Logistics Society of INFORMS, Director of the Centre for Research on Transportation (currently CIRRELT), and received the 2006 Merit Award of the Canadian Operational Research Society.

The research interests of Professor Crainic are in network, integer, and combinatorial optimization, meta-heuristics, and parallel computing applied to the planning and management of complex systems, particularly in transportation and logistics. Major contributions targeted the design, scheduling and management of consolidation-based carrier services, including uncertainty, resource and revenue management considerations, as well as routing and scheduling, Intelligent Transportation Systems, City Logistics, new business and organizational transportation and logistics models, regional planning of multimodal freight transportation systems, and combinatorial electronic markets.

Professor Crainic published some 290 scientific papers and chapters, and has a h-index of 77 (Google Scholar). He co-edited the Network Design with Applications in Transportation and Logistics book published by Springer in 2021, as well as numerous special issues of major scientific journals. He supervised over 160 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.