Science and research know no borders – and, as is well known, live from exchange. Therefore, we were very happy to welcome Prof. Wolrad Rommel from the German-Kazakh University in Almaty for an international exchange at TU Darmstadt.

Innovating the transport sector one step at a time: At the 6th Interdisciplinary Conference on Production, Logistics and Traffic (ICPLT) at Technical University Dortmund, Prof. Elbert and Research Associate Hongjun Wu were thrilled to share insights into the Chair’s research on a dynamic container routing problem on a rail-based hub-and-spoke network.

The transfer of our research results in the Combined Transport Innovation Lab at the House of Logistics and Mobility, Frankfurt am Main, thrives on exchange – including and sometimes especially with our students, who had the opportunity to get to know the showroom and HOLM together with Prof. Elbert on 1 February 2023.

Today we would like to present the AiF IFL project “roboKOM”, which we successfully completed last year together with Prof. Elbert, Julia Wenzel as well as Giorgi Tadumadze and Dr. Weidinger from the Chair of Management Science/Operations Research. The project dealt with the application areas of mobile picking robots and was consequently dedicated to a current and relevant topic.

Combined transport not only drives our research, but also our teaching! During our Logistics Live! excursion this winter semester, our students were given a tangible and practical insight into the design of combined transport (CT) transport chains. They learned first-hand about the potentials and benefits associated with the use of CT and the difficulties and problems CT actors face. In order to get to know the interfaces of the two transport modes rail and road in more detail, 28 students together with the team of the Chair were allowed to visit first the Railport Darmstadt of DB Cargo AG and then the KTL Kombi-Terminal Ludwigshafen last Friday. We would like to express our sincere thanks to Jan Bellinger, who guided the students around the Railport site, vividly demonstrating the challenges that have been overcome in recent years and how new concepts for the Railport have been developed and implemented. The impressions gained at Railport were greatly complemented by a presentation at KTL by Harald Schlegel and a bus tour of the KTL site, during which the students learned more about the handling of intermodal transports in one of Europe's leading transshipment terminals. The students followed the path of a loading unit and experienced live which steps it goes through during cargo handling as well as upstream and downstream and which administrative measures are necessary in the background. The team of the Chair and especially Prof. Elbert, Anne Friedrich and Felix Roeper are very grateful for and happy about the exciting insights and the hospitality of the practice partners, which made the successful organization of the excursion possible!

How could new business model innovations revolutionize the information exchange in transportation? This question was central to our master seminar on lots of exciting topics connected to digital platforms in transportation. On 19 January 2023, to officially close the seminar, 28 students presented the results of their seminar work at our Innovation Lab on Combined Transport at the House of Logistics and Mobility in Frankfurt (Main). During the seminar, our students researched the potential of digital transport platforms to fundamentally change the organization of transport chains and what potential these platforms offer to increase efficiency and productivity along the transport chains. They examined the business models of existing platforms in the market and developed classifications for them. In some cases, the students addressed the entire intermodal transport chain or examined different solutions from other fields of transport (such as last mile/city logistics platforms) and specialized platforms (such as web-based time window management systems). They also made country comparisons (between transportation platforms in Germany and the U.S.), identified trends in platform solutions in the mobility sector (such as increasing sharing concepts), and applied these to freight transportation. The team around Prof. Elbert thanks all students for the exciting lectures and lively discussions, and Anne Friedrich and Felix Roeper for the supervision of the course and successful closing event!

“Logistics is about connecting the world,” Matthias Hanke from Roland Berger AG quite accurately stated during a very successful guest lecture on considerations from the perspective of Logistics service providers (LSPs) and carriers here at TU Darmstadt last Tuesday.

The digitization of transport chains continues to advance in the new year. Thus, increasing digitization may also open up opportunities to take further steps in the direction of synchromodal transport chains. The topic of synchromodal transport chains, which is also being promoted by the European Commission, is synchronized and interconnected transport networks that allow the means of transport to be changed in real time. This enables greater use of environmentally friendly means of transport, such as rail or inland waterways.

A new research project has started: With “KIBA”, we are researching artificial intelligence and discrete loading optimization models for increasing capacity utilization in combined transport together with Prof. Elbert and project manager Yuerui Tang.

How can research contribute to current challenges to business practice? The shift in transport routes or new demands on technology, for example, require new perspectives.