Today, value adding activities increasingly take place in work-sharing processes. At the same time this specialization leads to an increased need of communication along the value chain. Next to new information flows, new material flows are created. Logistics service providers take over the essential spatial and temporal organization of transport flows with the help of public transport infrastructure. Moreover, the increased environmental legislation asks for an increased sustainability of freight traffic. These aspects show the mutual interdependence between the subsystems logistics and traffic. Holistic improvements can only be achieved with an interdisciplinary approach accounting for the various trade-offs between the subsystems.

With SimuLoVe, which is funded by the TU Darmstadt’s central QSL commission, the cooperating chairs from the fields of logistics and traffic want to consider these aspects in teaching. The interdisciplinary case study based on simulation will support the interdisciplinary competence of the students and will also help to experience the mutual dependence of the disciplinary approaches. The simulation model will be configurable using various parameters on a graphical interface and the evaluation will be possible by means of a dynamic visualization. Hence, students can recognize their own planning horizon and can also verify the impacts of the planned actions using the simulation.