Logistics and supply chain management deal with managing the ?ow of goods or services within a company, from suppliers to customers, and along a supply chain where companies act as suppliers as well as customers. As transportation is at the heart of logistics, the design of tra?c and transportation networks combined with the routing of vehicles and goods on the networks are important and demanding planning tasks. The in?uence of transport, logistics, and s- ply chain management on the modern economy and society has been growing steadily over the last few decades. The worldwide division of labor, the conn- tion of distributed production centers, and the increased mobility of individuals lead to an increased demand for e?cient solutions to logistics and supply chain management problems. On the company level, e?cient and e?ective logistics and supply chain management are of critical importance for a company’s s- cessanditscompetitiveadvantage. Properperformanceofthelogisticsfunctions can contribute both to lower costs and to enhanced customer service. Computational Intelligence (CI) describes a set of methods and tools that often mimic biological or physical principles to solve problems that have been di?cult to solve by classical mathematics. CI embodies neural networks, fuzzy logic, evolutionary computation, local search, and machine learning approaches. Researchersthat workinthis areaoften comefromcomputer science,operations research,or mathematics, as well as from many di?erent engineering disciplines. Popular and successful CI methods for optimization and planning problems are heuristic optimization approaches such as evolutionary algorithms, local search methods, and other types of guided search methods.
The book at hand presents a careful selection of relevant applications of CI methods for transport, logistics, and supply chain management problems. The chapters illustrate the current state-of-the-art in the application of CI methods in these fields and should help and inspire researchers and practitioners to apply and develop efficient methods. A few contributions in this book are extended versions of papers presented at EvoTransLog2007: The First European Workshop on Evolutionary Computation in Transportation and Logistics which was held in Valencia, Spain, in 2007. The majority of contributions are from additional, specially selected researchers, who have done relevant work in different areas of transport, logistics, and supply chain management. The goal is to broadly cover representative applications in these fields as well as different types of solution approaches. On the application side, the contributions focus on design of traffic and transportation networks, vehicle routing, and other important aspects of supply chain management such as inventory management, lot sizing, and lot scheduling. On the method side, the contributions deal with evolutionary algorithms, local search approaches, and scatter search combined with other CI techniques such as neural networks or fuzzy approaches. The book is structured according to the application domains. Thus, it has three parts dealing with traffic and transportation networks, vehicle routing, and supply chain management.
